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Backed by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) of the Department of Telecommunications, Government owned Telecom company BSNLhas started rolling out wire-line broadband connectivity to rural & remote areas. DOT has signed an agreement with BSNL to provide 8,61,459 connections to individual users and government Institutions through rural and remote exchanges over a period of 5-years, i.e., by 2014. Continue Reading »

All 2,566 gram panchayats in north Gujarat have undergone a transformation from simple panchayats. On Friday, 724 gram panchayats in Sabarkantha, 595 in Mehsana, 783 in Banaskantha and 464 in Patan became e-gram.
It was a new experience for people living in villages near Pakistan border in Banaskantha and those at Ratanpur in Patan and at Amirgagadh in Mehsana.
District collector Banaskantha, RJ Patel, who was camping in Iqbalgadh said, “As many as 500 people could not hide their surprise when Chief Minister Narendra Modi began giving replies to their questions online.” [Via]

About 18,000 Common Service Centres (CSCs) have been set up in the country to provide IT enabled services to the people in the rural areas. These are part of the overall plan of the Government to establish One Lakh CSCs in 600,000 villages. All the CSCs are scheduled to be operational by July next year.
In the states of Jharkhand and Haryana, the roll out of the Centres is complete while in Gujarat it will be completed soon. The other states where a number of CSCs have already become operational are West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Orissa, Meghalaya and Tripura.
A Common Services Centre is an ICT-enabled Service Delivery outlet providing a range of services to the people in the village / town in which it is located. The Government has approved the Common Service Centre Scheme that envisions CSCs as the front-end delivery points for Government, private and social sector services to rural citizens in an integrated manner. The objective is to develop a platform that can enable Government, private and social sector organizations to align their social and commercial goals for the benefit of the rural population in the remotest corners. The Centres are being designed as ICT-enabled Kiosks having a PC along with basic support equipment like Printer, Scanner, UPS, with Wireless Connectivity as the backbone and additional equipment for edutainment, telemedicine, projection systems, etc.
The Scheme is to be implemented through a Public Private Partnership. It has been approved at a total cost of Rs 5742 Cr. over 4 years, of which the Government of India is estimated to contribute Rs 856 Cr. and the State Governments Rs 793 Cr. The balance resources would be mobilized from the private sector. [Via Release]

Tamil Nadu’s new information and communication technology (ICT) policy aims at broad basing the IT industry as part of the efforts to bring development as an inclusive phenomenon.
According to K S Tripathy, chief secretary, Tamil Nadu has a well-established e-governance network in place. The state data centre is being upgraded and it will be accessible to users soon. Already, all the blocks and talukas are e-connected. In the first phase, seven districts have been identified for the purpose.
The government’s objective is to make technology reach the rural areas, and it is making an effort to set up Internet-enabled kiosks in 5400 villages in the state. [Via]

Turkmenistan has begun allowing private citizens to connect to the Internet, the latest sign that the reclusive Central Asian nation is opening up.
The country’s only Internet provider, Turkmentelekom, said Thursday that it has been connecting up to 20 homes daily since the start of the week, mainly in the capital Ashgabat. It said it has a waiting list of 2,000 people.
“As of this week we have begun connecting customers, regardless of their professional status,” a Turkmentelekom statement said.
Last year, president Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov allowed the country’s first Internet cafe. Until then, Internet use had been restricted solely to government employees, diplomatic posts and offices for major international companies. [Via]

In a move which would have significant implications, Gujarat is planning to be the first state to provide high-speed connectivity through satellite-based data connections to all its 13,693 gram panchayats, by July this year, enabling video, voice and data offerings in the areas of e-governance, distance education, telemedicine, agriculture and interactive advisory and counselling services.
Each panchayat will have its own email address and more than 13,000 of them will be hosted on the state-owned data centre.
Bharti Airtel, the implementing agency, which began work on the project in January, plans to connect the panchayats with broadband connectivity at speeds of 2mbps. [Via]

Adding the 10.16 million wireless (GSM, CDMA, WLL) subscribers in March, India overtook USA to ranks at second place after China. The total wireless subscribers now stands at 261.09 million.
A total of 10.40 million telephone connections (Wireline and Wireless) have been added during March 2008 as compared to 8.49 million connections added in February 2008. This implies a reach of 300.51 million at the end of March 2008 against a reach of 290.11 million in February 2008 taking the overall tele-density from 25.31% in February 2008 to 26.22% in March 2008.
Broadband, defined as speeds above 256 Kbps, had a subscriber base of 3.90 million at the end of March 2008 against that of 3.47 million at the end of Fenruary 2008. Clearly we have a long way to go to achieve its target of 20 million broadband subscribers by 2010 – more so if TRAI actually goes ahead with its proposed definition of broadband.
Download the complete report here.

Related reads:
Mobile Internet On The Rise
Internet Reach On Mobiles Is 19 Times More Than Broadband

“Well over 3.5 billion mobile phones are in use around the world and organizations are harnessing this technology to help overcome humanitarian challenges,” according to Timothy E. Wirth, President of the United Nations Foundation.
The recent report, Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, examines emerging trends in “mobile activism” by looking at 11 case studies of groups active in the areas of public health, humanitarian assistance and environmental conservation.
These include the text messaging ‘nerve center’ that Oxfam-Great Britain and the Kenyan umbrella group PeaceNet created which collected alerts about violent outbreaks during the recent civil unrest and mobilized local ‘peace committees.’ The project served as a vital tool for conflict management and prevention by providing a hub for real-time information about actual and planned attacks between rival ethnic and political groups.
The GSM Association, together with a handful of non-profit and private sector groups in Kenya, developed another conflict prevention project that allows farmers to preserve their crops while protecting wildlife. The program monitors instances when elephants approach farmed land, and provides an early warning system via mobile that is reducing the incidence of human-elephant conflict in an area where as many as five humans and 10 elephants are killed each year.
Other case studies cover the areas of public health (such as connecting health workers to one another in Uganda), humanitarian assistance (such as alerting Iraqi refugees to food aid drop offs in Syria), and environmental conservation (such as using text messages to raise awareness about deforestation in Argentina).
About 86% of non-governmental organization (NGO) employees use mobile technology in their work, with 25% believing it has revolutionized the way their organization or project works. While the most common uses of mobile technology by NGO workers are voice calls (90%) and text messaging (83%), about 10% use mapping functionalities, 8% use it for data analysis, and 8% for inventory management.

A community project to provide high speed Internet, telemedicine, e-education and e-governance services to the rural areas of Tamil Nadu was made operational in Vadugambadi, about 60 km south of state capital Chennai. The facilities will be provided for the first time in India with the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) systems under the Gramjyoti programme of the central government.
At the three community centres cum panchayat offices, the Apollo Hospital’s telemedicine service has provided a paramedic, who can do basic check ups for those needing medical attention.
There are plans to bring about 100,000 villages under the fold of the programme.
[Via]

E-Halli, conceptualised on the basis of former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s ‘Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA)’, aims at bridging the information gap between villages and cities. The E-Halli centres would provide services and information about various schemes of Government departments, both Central and State, gram panchayats, banks, hospitals, blood banks, diagnostic centres, veterinary centres, market prices, agricultural farming, business, educational institutions, timings and fare of busses, trains, flights, the place of reservation and goods transport system.
In the first phase, the centres will be established in 10 districts, and grow to finally cover 5,628 gram panchayats in the State. [Via]