India Wants To Build Massive Digital Infrastructure To Cover 800 Million Rural Citizens by 2019

A $17-billion government program to build a national optical fiber network that will connect India’s gram panchayats, or village-level governments, aims to cover the entire country in three years and could be a game changer, an Indian minister told Forbes.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, minister of communications and IT, and the head of the advisory group which supervises the implementation of the Digital India program, as it is called, said the program was approved by the Indian cabinet last month, and aims to cover 50,000 gram panchayats this year, 100,000 next year and the remaining 100,000 the following year. India’s 600,000 villages where over 800 million live, are administered by these local self-governments. “The entire country will be covered by broadband within three years and the internet will reach the remotest villages,” Prasad said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who steered the Digital India policy, is personally overseeing the project to ensure deadlines are met, he said. 

The program would rapidly drive internet usage in India and boost the economy. “India is sitting at the cusp of a huge digital revolution,” said Prasad.

“Something big is unfolding,” said Hemant Joshi, partner at advisory firm, Deloitte Haskins & Sells. But the Digital India program is not without challenges, experts said. Finding the financial resources and meeting program deadlines could be foremost among those. India’s structure where governments ruling the country and the states are sometimes led by different political parties could throw up additional complications, Joshi said. There is also the matter of ‘right of way’ when laying thousands of miles of fiber optic cable.
The government plans to hire at least 10 CIOs to oversee the Digital India program in key ministries, and create four other senior positions for dealing with adoption of standards and security aspects.

The government will create an enabling platform that will aid in delivering government services to citizens as well as services in education, healthcare, entertainment and e-commerce. “Public services like land records and caste certificates will be made available online on demand online,” Prasad said. In conjunction with state governments, 20-hour e-literacy training programs in local languages will be conducted in 200,000 community service centers across the country.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2014/09/18/india-wants-to-build-massive-digital-infrastructure-to-cover-800-million-rural-citizens-by-2019/