The trench running along the road linking Kodicherla and Penjarla in southern India is just 5 feet deep and about half as wide. Yet it carries the promise of a better life for the people of those villages, and all of Telangana.
Within the ditch lie two pipes, a large black one carrying fresh water and smaller blue one containing a fiber optic broadband cable. The government of Telangana, a state born of the 2014 secession from Andhra Pradesh after its residents accused the government of systematic neglect, is doing something unprecedented in India: bringing broadband internet to every rural home in the region, some 23 million people in all.
Of the 4 billion people around the globe without access to the internet, one-quarter of them live in India. Many, including tech giants in the US, are eager to close this gap. The same year that Telangana seceded, Facebook targeted India for Internet.org. The service, now called Free Basics, provides a free but limited internet to rural areas of the developing world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the proposal, and the company launched the service in 2015.
Indians almost immediately rejected it, arguing that the platform was biased because it offered only a limited number of online services and violated the notion of net neutrality by privileging Facebook and a few others. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India blocked Internet.org about early last year. The country clearly saw an online future brighter than what Facebook was offering.
And now Telangana is building it.
From the start, the government of this emerging state wanted to do something to immediately and significantly improve people’s lives. Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao decided that running water is an absolute necessity. Bringing that to the state’s thousands of rural villages required laying pipes. K.T. Rama Rao, who is the minister of Information Technology and the chief minister’s son, convinced the government to lay fiber optic broadband cables at the same time. “We were just envisioning and visualizing how it would be to have a state that is completely connected and wired,” he says. “What are the possibilities?”
They named the project Telangana Fiber.
Bits and Pieces
Once a week, Ravinder Kethavath rides his motorcycle a little more than 7 miles into town just to log onto the internet. Sitting in a tiny cybercafé, he browses job postings and checks on upcoming exams for the police service. Then he rides home. Kethavath, 24, lives in a village about 60 miles from the state capital of Hyderabad, and says a home internet connection offers an immediate path to a better life. “I could easily get updates and alerts related to jobs and news as well as have a bright future, which would allow me to take good care of my mother and sister,” he says.
Internet access in rural India is piecemeal. You can find Wi-Fi hotspots in many towns, where young, tech-savvy users watch YouTube videos on smartphones. But connections are slow and unreliable, if available at all. Although Telangana’s rural residents comprise just over 2 percent of the offline population of India, Rao believes connecting Kethavath’s generation would bring immense change to the country.
“Once you have this in place, I believe there will be a paradigm shift in living standards,” he says. “There will be a paradigm shift in the way you could communicate both on the account of health and education, because these two are really what burden the rural households.”
Many agree. A study drawn from data in more than 100 countries found that a 1 percent increase in the number of internet users in a region raises the GDP per employed person by $8 to $15. Other studies show internet access can improve health and education by bringing telemedicine and educational opportunities to more people.
Before any of this can happen in Telangana, the government must lay more than 62,000 miles of fiber optic cable in more than 22,000 villages.
It hopes to do this by the end of next year.
Beyond Balloons and Drones
Entrepreneur Sujai Karampuri oversees this enormous project. He’s never worked in government, but has years of experience designing wireless technologies for remote areas. Private telecommunication firms haven’t closed the internet gap, he says, because acquiring each new customer is prohibitively expensive. Laying fiber optic cables and installing cell towers requires immense capital, and ultimately reaches relatively few people because India’s rural population is so widely dispersed.
Google proposes bringing internet access to rural areas via high-altitude balloons, while Facebook is exploring beaming signals from high-altitude drones. Karampuri considers such things impractical, and says such technologies don’t preclude the need for infrastructure on the ground “It’s more like a gap-filling exercise,” he says.
That’s why he and the government are laying cables. By piggybacking on the state’s water project, he and his team needn’t worry about the time and cost of digging trenches. They need only lay cables and everything associated with them, something they estimate will cost about $800 million. Karampuri is soliciting funding from private companies, and the state hopes to recover costs by leasing the network to private telecoms. Singapore built a nationwide broadband network using the same model, although India offers the added challenge of being far larger, and largely undeveloped.
The Here and Now
But Rao and others within his ministry are planning for the day internet access is ubiquitous. They are pushing other ministries to digitize records. They’re developing an open-data policy. They’re embarking on a digital literacy campaign to ensure each household in Telangana has at least one person who understands the basics of using the internet. And they plan to provide a router to any family that cannot afford one.
Rao and his team envision a state where the health department can send residents immunization reminders days before a mobile health clinic arrives in their village. Where farmers can research market prices for their crops rather than depend upon brokers and middlemen. Where a mother 100 miles from the capital can pose questions to the chief minister.
And where Ravinder Kethavath can browse job postings from the comfort of home.
Telangana Fiber hopes to reach 23 million people. But Rao sees it as a model to bring the internet to 1.3 billion people throughout India. He’s already discussed the idea with officials in four other Indian states. His message to them and the rest of the country: “It’s not something that’s happening in the future. It’s happening now.”
Hui Wu is a freelance journalist based in India.
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One Indian State’s Grand Plan to Get 23 Million People Online