Rural Internet Connectivity: A New Perspective

ICT is certainly a very potent tool to transform the rural economy. There is a very strong need for the penetration of ICT in the rural sector as it will generate tremendous employement for the rural youth in the area of IT and ITES sector like Busness Process Outsourcing, Data Processin, software developement and services, Internet content developement apart from the fact that the usage of ICT shall facilitate the economic developement by increasing the business, better marketability, opening newer bisness avenues, Improvement in productivity, cutting down the cost of transaction, bringing speed in the business process, transparency and empowerment.
There are numerous ways through which one can realize the power of ICT for rural upliftment but the First and Foremost thing is the connectivity. It is imperative that the government as a part of it's social obligation of bringing infrastructure developement shall immediately ensure the availability of affordable broadband connectivity in each and every village of the country. The urgency of this need is being felt at the upper echeleon of some quarter of the government who are pushing this movement but still we are not able to see the desired results.
We are witnessing the discussions and deliberations on this regard at different forums since quite some time, over the form of the technology to be used viz Cordect, Wimax, 3G etc.
The government is trying to attract operators at various levels to create the infrastructure for last mile connectivity in the rural area. With the mandate from Ministry of Information technology various state governments have initiated the project of establishing State Wide Area Network (SWAN) using the relatively low cost technology in private public Partnership. Setting up of SWAN is a welcome move but the government should take the following care that
It should be implementaed in a time bound manner with utmost urgency
Government should ensure that not a single village should be left uncovered
Technology like WIMAX and 3G makes last mile connectivity possible but initial revenue generated from selling the connectivity at the village may not bring immidiate financial viablity so the governemnt should find a wayout to promote the establishment of socially important infrastructure at the village level
Connectivity shaould be given priority over populist plans like building of toilets, poverty alleviation programme, loan waiver, interest waiver etc... as it will initiate the structural change in the rural sector
The Connectivity should be made available at affordable prices and it should be treated as an essantial commodity.

With the aforesaid priorities the government should ensure that the villagers get acess to broad band within their reach. It is a high time that the connectivity is made available in the villages because the Goverment of India is already working on Common Service Centre (CSC) scheme with an objective of establishing CSCs in 100000 villages across the country in Partnership with the private players, so with so many private players in sight we shall be seeing a great leap in content and application developement for rural sector which shall be a stepping stone in bridging the digital divide in Urban and rural India. Apart from CSCs we are also witnessing the increasing usage of ICT in Procurement of commodities from the farmer, internet banking, commodity exhange (Future exchange as well as the comming up of spot exchanges), Telemedicine, Online trading, BPO, ebusiness, eGovernance, distance education through net, and all the aforesaid activities have tremendous potential in the rural economy and we can witness a new wave in growth kickstarted by rural connectivity. So today the slogan given by Late Dewang Mehta ROTI, KAPDA, MAKAN aur CONNECTIVITY seems to be pertinent.