Various Problems in realising the Digital India Initiative

The various road blocks that are to be removed in order to realize “Digital India” dream are as follows –

1. We use roads, railways, airports, harbours for everybody’s transport but same is not the case with communications networks. All major service providers have to purchase their own spectrum bandwidths for providing broadband and mobile services. This results in increased expenditure and suboptimal performance as a single Mega Hertz band has to be divided into many sub parts thereby reducing performance.

2. National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) which is under construction by Bharat Broadband Network Limited will be one point operational platform unlike the spectrum allocation but it can not be the alternative for whole country as fibre laying requires massive investments. So spectrum allocation has to made more efficient which at present it is not to cover the whole country.

3.  Improper and inefficient allocation of resources led to the cancellation of 2G licenses by Supreme Court. This environment may deter global telecom companies from investing in India. So a collaborative policy approach should be formulated by involving Dept. of Telecommunication, Electronics and Information Technology, Central Ministries (Finance, Defense and Information & Broadcasting) , State Govt. concerned PSU, judiciary and inputs from public.

4. Our administrative set up is more deterrent than technology limitation factor. That needs to be streamlined smoothly causing least damage to present players.