Is Digital India faltering? Targets still in search of finding a connect

Two years after the government announced the National Digital Communication Policy in September 2018, its targets to make the “Digital India” vision a reality are faltering.
 

At the core of the plan was broadband connectivity to all through a combination of fibre and building a wifi hot spot eco system.

To achieve that, the policy targeted deploying over 5 million public wifi hot spots by 2020, and to double that by 2022.
 

After two years, only 6 per cent of the target has been achieved with 306,000 hot spots in the country, according to the DigiAnalysis data, updated till August 2019. The research agency has projected it would hit 2.1 million by the end of 2021, but that is again is a mere fifth of the 2022 target.
 

The policy has targeted setting up 2 million rural hot spots in four years. Yet only 4 per cent of that has been installed. And if one looks at the number of operational wifis in rural India, which stands at a mere under 30,000, the picture looks even more dismal.
 

T V Ramachandran, president of the Broadband India Forum, said: “We have 100 days to achieve the target of 5 million wifi hot spots and 10 million in 2022. It’s a huge challenge, and even then we may not be at par with global peers.”
 

Ramachandran said the policies followed in the past two decades to create a wifi ecosystem had not worked. “We should adopt the Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) recommendation to liberalise wifi and create seamless activity by allowing local entrepreneurs to bloom. Without this the vision for ‘broadband for all’ may not be realised,” he warned.

 

Telecom operators are, however, not in favour of any such move.
 

Trai Chairman R S Sharma stated recently telcos’ perception that wifi hot spots would cut into their data wireless revenue was short-term thinking.
 

It is now up to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to take a call.
 

Not only that, the policy aims at enabling fixed-line broadband access to 50 per cent of the 248 million households. But that could be a big challenge, considering the fact that there are fewer than 20 million fixed-line broadband connections in the country. And the problem of right of way, despite being areas of focus in the policy, has made many companies like Reliance Jio reassess their earlier plans.
 

But the big one is to provide 1 GBPS connectivity to all gram panchayats by 2020. But that is clearly not possible, because currently only 57 per cent of the 250,000 gram panchayats have optic fibre connection and equipment installed, according to Bharat Broadband Network Ltd, which is implementing the project.
 

But the good news is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given a clarion call: In his independence speech this year he set a stiff target that every village (there are more than 500,000) in the country had to be connected with optical fibre in 1,000 days.

Yet to do that would be a mammoth task, considering the various flip flops on the deadlines. According to E&Y, it would require laying cable from the current speed of 350 km a day to 1,251 km a day.
 

Closely related to the fiberisation drive is the policy target that at least 60 per cent of the mobile towers need to be fiberised by 2022. It’s not rocket science: 5G, which supports huge bandwidth, requires towers with fibre backhaul replacing the microwave linkage. Also now technologies like open radio access networks (where software and hardware can be bought separately and work on open platforms) require fibre backhaul to work efficiently.
 

A top executive of a leading tower company said: “Currently the industry is at 30 per cent fiberisation, to double it by, say, 2023 would require over $3.5 billion.” But to justify that investment the rollout of 5G (as average tenancies have fallen because of consolidation already), which most telcos believe has been delayed, will not happen before 2022, and that also will happen in some cities. So it all depends on the business scenario.
 

Telecom analyst Mahesh Uppal points out the key problems with the National Telecom Policy.
 

“The policy sets targets but lacks any analysis of earlier failures. For example, why has India so few wifi hot spots or no take up of virtual network operators? Do players have commercial disincentives? The policy should have identified and removed them and left the market to take care of the numbers.”
 

He also points out that the policy talks about rationalising levies such as licence fee and spectrum usage charges. However, the DoT has historically resisted any measure that hurts government revenue. This would rule out any sharp reduction in levies and, in turn, the relief the sector needs.
 

Not only that, the policy, instead of its goal of revenue maximisation from spectrum auction, made a significant change, saying spectrum should be priced “optimally” to ensure affordable access. Yet in the 4G auction, the high base price set by Trai, which telcos have questioned unanimously, have not been changed by the DoT.
 

Also many of the policy goals are stuck because of differences between the DoT and Trai. For instance, Trai had recommended that the V and E bands, which are used for tower backhaul and are cheaper to deploy than fibre and crucial for 5G deployment, should be given out for a nominal fee in 2014 . But the DoT is divided whether they should be auctioned or given at an administered price. A decision is still hanging fire.