Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

Indian telcos Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are on a roll. Almost every week, there is news of either or both of them rolling out fifth generation (5G) networks in one town or another. 

Both have pledged to roll out high-speed 5G networks by the end of 2024, when India goes to polls nationally—quite possibly the fastest 5G network rollout anywhere in the world so far. For which India’s telcos are putting up 10,000 5G sites (or say steel frame towers used for mounting radio antennas) every week. 

The 4G mobile network rollout is almost complete. And for 5G, it’s now all hands on deck. 

But the story is different for rural India, where connectivity remains patchy at best. Despite all telco claims about covering the length and breadth of India, reliable internet connectivity continues to remain a privilege in hundreds of thousands of rural habitats across the country. 

And the graveyard of government projects aimed at fixing this gap only continues to grow.

Project-graveyard.gov

In 2021, well-known policy think-tank ICRIER released a report titled: Building an inclusive digital society for rural India. It highlights some interesting facts. 

Only two out of 10 people in rural Jharkhand access the internet, and only close to three in Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, and Assam.

This is despite the government spending several thousands of crores on laying down optical fibre to connect these places to the internet, and sitting on a corpus of Rs 55,000 crore (~US$6.7 billion) in the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) as of early 2022. The telecom department collects 5% of adjusted gross revenue from telcos for the USOF every year, which is meant to be used for funding connectivity projects in remote areas.   

And speaking of such projects, first, the previous UPA government earmarked Rs 20,000 crore (~US$2.4 billion) for a National Optical Fibre Network in 2011. Considering where we are right now, clearly that failed in the execution. Then came the current NDA government in 2014, which announced an ambitious Digital India programme in July 2015. By the end of 2019, that had lost its sheen. 

During its second term, which began in 2019, Prime Minister chose Independence Day 2020 (15 August) to announce another major push. The government, he promised, would cover all six lakh villages in India with optical fibre connectivity in the next 1,000 days. That promised deadline will end in the next five months.