I am all for inclusive development that benefit all segments of any society. India being a developing country, just like China, is facing the challenges to bring modern infrastructures to all its regions. Comparing to the case of China, India may have more difficulties as it has to rely on private entities to facilitate this transition, and private companies are for profit. They will not provide services to the population that them deem unprofitable.
Hence the initial infrastructure will be laid by public or public-private partnership entities. Private companies, especially with the credit crunch many of them are still in (due to the reckless splurge they were coerced into doing under the last administration)....definitely cannot plug the demand to any large degree because of the huge capex to revenue ratio.
Thats why be rail/road/fiber "ways" or any other major infrastructure will come from the central and state resources for the time being and even forseeable future.
Where the private sector comes in is partnership with these govt efforts where they can (to bring additional expertise, funding they can manage and efficient contract fulfilling).....but mainly the leasing/operation of the infrastructure. Already this is for example being started with some projects in the Railways for example.....and its already in full swing with the broadband/mobile services in cities....given that private companies are naturally more efficient at the operations side in India especially when you bring in ample competition.
Govt owned companies have time and time again shown they are quite bad at service provision in India (in efficiency/quality perspective) with a few exceptions (but only a few).
$20-$50 a month may not sound much for affluent population in the cities, but it may be a large sum of money for rural people. One example is the "Clean Stove" movement initiated in 1950's in India, and its initial cost of $30-$50 turned away majority of perspective users. So the "Clean Stove" program was not considered successful as there are still 500 million Indians rely on "cow dung" to cook. Is there any provision in Modi's "Digital India" plan to address this issue?
Hence why the focus is on increasing low-bandwidth mobile networks while incomes are still quite low....and wait for urbanisation to catch up to the critical mass needed especially in the Ganges river states and the heartland just below it.
The mobile phone way is cheap infra, cheap costs, high provider competition and can provide the very basic essentials like banking/microcredit/basic news/farming resources etc. With mass economy of scale, I dont think the 2mbps goal is far out of reach since this will be the peak speed, the cap will be controlled and is quite ample for these basics (as we can see its already just 12 dollars monthly....I bet this will drop even further with larger economies of scale and sharing of connection etc)....
So it will be kept low and any further subsidies/financial aid can be accessed through the mobile banking itself...cutting the middle men (and thus its a self-sustaining technology).
It sounds good on paper of course and we will have to wait and see how well it is actually implemented....but seeing the success of various projects on the ground already (and the success of mobile telephony even under the last crappy+corrupt administration)....I think we can be somewhat optimistic.
Those of course that can afford much more will have access to it (in the cities)....before even this wasn't the case in India (there were large waiting lists for cars, phones, scooters, vans, TVs almost everything...not to mention business licenses and financing)....so there is no looking back for sure.
I hate those who go out of the game halfway,if Indian play with Chinese maybe many Chinese will suffer from heart attack....
