Digital india must broaden its base

Digital india must broaden its base

India now has 75 crore internet connections, of which 70 crore are broadband connections. This represents around 50 crore subscribers — the same person can have multiple mobile phones, each with a broadband connection, plus a fixed-line connection. But the number of broadband users would be significantly higher than the number of subscribers, as many connections would be shared, say, at cyber cafés. As high a proportion as 97% of internet connections in India are through mobile phones.

This is still Digital India, as Bharat, accounting for two-thirds of the population, accounts for one-third the internet connections. Within these limitations, amazing things are possible and are being actualised. The government launched GST with a digital operating framework. The government has innovated services such as Jeevan Pramaan, for pensioners to obtain a digital life certificate remotely. All states should enable their pension services to use digital life certificates. A plan to digitise health records and make them portable across the land is underway. Ration cards are already portable. Many more such services will flourish and make life simpler and government services more transparent.

Aadhaar and a clutch of application programming interfaces to make use of Aadhaar, called IndiaStack, have enabled India to forge ahead of industrial nations in digitising many services. Electronic commerce is no longer just about urban consumers being plied with discounts and a greater variety of everything. It is also about a host of small producers finding new consumers and new markets, some of them abroad, thanks to the small business programmes of Amazon and Flipkart. When handloom sarees or Gond paintings find new markets, it changes the lives of the artisans involved, and creates extra business for website developers, graphic artists, payment processors, server farms, packaging material suppliers, logistics companies and delivery personnel. However, broadband speeds are patchy and uneven. Server capacity, even of banks, is suboptimal. These niggles should go.