India craves for everyday internet access

India is known for companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS has built a stand of its own in the global world for Information Technology. The Indian Information technology of India accounts nearly 5.19 percent of the country's GDP and export earnings as of 2009. But we lack the capacity to provide the same technology to our own people - Internet access. In 2010 out of 1,173,108,018 populations there was only 8.5 percentage of internet usage in India. Therefore Indians are craving for everyday internet access.

Furthermore as revealed in The Express Tribune a young girl frustrated by the country's poor internet facilities is Srishti Sharma, 18, a student of the Lady Shri Ram College in the capital New Delhi ,said "There are times when you desperately need to do some research using the net, and the only place you can go to is the library which is packed since there are only about ten computers there,"

The 18 year old girl Shrishti carries her laptop out of the college grounds to internet cafes and pays for access to a wi-fi connection.

The political science student added "Almost every day I have to leave campus to do my work. It's really irritating, you end up wasting so much time going back and forth,".

In many ways, Shristi is among the lucky ones as India's 1.2 billion people hassle to gather the benefits of the country's economic transformation.

According to forecasts by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), by the end of this year only three per cent of all Indians living in rural areas will be active internet users .
The low figure comes despite an expected doubling in the number of rural users, from 12.1 million in December last year to 24 million in December this year.

Technology giant Cisco published data in June demonstrating that the global internet usage will increase between 2010 and 2015, but that India will still remain behind emerging market competitors like China, South Africa and Mexico in terms of per capita usage.

San Francisco-based technology consultant Ulrik McKnight, who works with firms in India, Europe and the US, told AFP "The government needs to make internet access a priority".

"Imagine the impact it could have on education. It's much cheaper to post course material online and give aspiring students a net connection than build colleges in every village."

He said that initially the government had faced opposition when they tried to bring new technology to India, with many saying that the authorities needed to focus on providing access to food and water, not phones and computers.
"The argument that basic needs trump other needs has been made again and again in India, against the introduction of colour television, personal computers and payphone booths," McKnight said.

Unlike the mobile phone, which spread quickly among all Indians from urban executives to farm workers, the internet has taken longer to catch on, IAMAI president Subho Ray said.

"The mobile phone was bound to succeed in India, it fulfilled a purpose since people found it difficult to get landlines set up," he said.

Analysts say India's absence of infrastructure from steady electricity to an extensive landline network has been a big stumbling block to broadening internet access.

A much-vaunted plan to create 20 million broadband connections by 2010 fell far short of its target, despite the government pegging broadband speed at a measly 256 kilobytes per second, 1/16th of the US standard of 4 megabytes per second.