Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has announced that the central government plans to set up 5 lakh WiFi spots in rural areas so as to enable easy access to the internet, for the inhabitants. These WiFi spots are expected to provide broadband access to five crore people in the rural areas.
“Task of connecting one lakh gram panchayats through high speed optical fibre network has been completed under phase I of the Bharatnet project. This has enabled broadband access to over 20 crore rural Indians in about 2,50,000 villages. The Government also proposes to setup five lakh WiFi hotspots which will provide broadband access to five crore rural citizens. I have provided Rs 10000 crore in 2018-19 for creation and augmentation of Telecom infrastructure”, said Jaitley in his Union Budget speech.
The government will work towards connecting 1.5 lakh more villages under BharatNet initiative, he said. Reports suggest that this could be a boon to the e-commerce industry as rural India is driving the growth of the industry itself. Market leaders like Flipkart, Amazon, and Paytm Mall, are all focusing on getting the small-town Indian consumer to shop online and this focus is showing results. Around 85 percent of Amazon’s customers come from Tier 2 and smaller cities.
In his Union Budget speech, Finance Minister Jaitley also said that in order to further harness the benefit of emerging new technologies, particularly Fifth Generation (5G) technologies and its adoption, the Department of Telecommunications will support setting up an indigenous 5G test bed at IIT, Chennai.
