|
Telecommunications
February 23, 2007
A Digital Vision for India
| |
|
|
| |
“There is a sense of euphoria in the country. Our telecom companies are receiving global attention. Corporate results of IT and ITES Companies are showing phenomenal growth. It reinforces my conviction and belief that, if we are given the right environment, we can do even more. I am aware that convergence is looming large in the Indian horizon. It is only a matter of time that Networks, Applications and Services will converge. In other words, Digital offerings will be across products and services. Storage hardware and bandwidth may become obsolete - a thing of the past. Content and Services will become the Unique Selling Point (USP),” said Dayanidhi Maran, Union Minister for Communication and IT, at the recently concluded India Digital Summit 2007.
|
|
NEW DELHI -- Phones with multimedia support and MP3 camera will usher in ubiquitous computing in the foreseeable future. User generated content is sweeping us. New concepts in journalism are rising. We are witnessing a new type of consumer who is also the producer. The present day consumer who is spoilt by free e-mail and browsing will resist convergence when content and service will be charged.
Are we ready for such a disruption? Convergence will offer an opportunity to recover from the erosion in enterprise value that takes place on account of disruptive technologies.
My vision for a digital India is an India connected with a network of communication technologies spanning optic fiber and wireless, interacting in all the 22 languages using server based, language to language machine translation and cross lingual information access facilities.
India is one of the top 6 Internet using nations in the world and the high double digit annual growth ensures increased new users coming on board every year. But, I have set my sight at higher goals: a look at the top 10 hosts of websites will indicate that the top three websites are all .com websites and their servers are all based in the European Countries. With a growth rate of the website hosting market, predicted at the rate of 0.62 percent, the target that I set for India, is to see .IN websites with servers based in India take the position in the top 10 Web hosting sites.
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) is soon going to provide transit bandwidth between its nodes. This will help small ISPs in remote areas to become viable. The .IN Registry is coming out with a brand building action plan, as this is the "YEAR OF THE BROADBAND". I have set very tough targets for my team and all I can say is, this is a classic Public Private Partnership (PPP). We can only do it together.
Connectivity is of critical importance to our country's development. When we talk of connectivity, let us from now own talk only about broadband and a minimum connectivity of 2 mbps.
As a mark of the Government's seriousness to promote broadband connectivity, on behalf of the Ministry of Communications and IT, the year 2007 has been declared as the Year of the Broadband. We intend the following targets:
- Broadband coverage for all Secondary and Higher Secondary schools
- Broadband coverage of all Public Health Care Centers
- Broadband coverage for all Gram Panchayats.
The Government is also aware that lowering of the bandwidth cost to consumer is essential to Internet proliferation. Low cost of mobile services has, to a large extent, ensured a rapid growth and adoption of mobile phones. Can we not replicate it in case of Internet? Or how can we replicate it in case of Internet? It is generally acceptable that the cost of Internet access in India is still very high compared to even developed countries in terms of purchasing power parity. This is an unacceptable situation.
Connectivity, of course, is not enough to ensure adoption of Internet. Content is another significant contributor to it. And since this gathering represents content providers, I have to say; we do not have much content today for consumers!
Recent study has revealed that the growth of Internet users in India has been driven largely by local language content. Our research in Indian languages and language technologies has borne fruit. We will soon launch Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) in the Indian Languages of Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and others, enabling local language domain names at the secondary level. We have already distributed, free of cost, language fonts and attendant software to enable development of websites in local languages. I have directed my research team to add further functionalities in this suit of local languages.
Also, we need to look at vernacular content now. If you look at the case of television in India, the real adoption and penetration came only when content became local. Even today many of the regional language channels enjoy better viewership than national channels. Similarly, in newspapers some of vernacular newspapers are way ahead of so called national dailies. Internet cannot be an exception to this rule. Of course, we need to set some acceptable standards for coding local languages so that literally all of us are on the same page. The Government would be happy to take the lead in this.
The National e-Governance Program (NeGP) would bring a substantial amount of useful content for the users. But that would be fulfilling just one aspect of a consumer's needs. Entrepreneurs such as you, have to take the lead.
Internet being an interactive medium gives us a great opportunity to find out what the customer wants. Let us leverage that advantage to the full extent and provide more and more useful services to them. We must ensure that the customers’ experience of the Internet is pleasant so that he returns to it again and again.
(Adapted from the Minister’s speech at the India Digital Summit.) |