SMART VILLAGE
Broadband internet arrived in Dhuktan, a tribal village of 2,850 people in Maharashtra’s Palghar district, 85 kilometres from Mumbai, only last year. But it’s made such an impact already that most villagers now use the local kiosk to pay bills online and access e-governance applications.
The village is one of seven in the state being used to pilot Project Gram Marg, the brainchild of two IIT Bombay professors, Abhay Karandikar and Sarbani Banerjee Belur. Project Gram Marg is India’s first TV White Space testbed, so called because it piggybacks on unused terrestrial broadcasting spectrum frequency. It uses the 500-520 MHz spectrum unutilised by Doordarshan’s terrestrial broadcast stations. This frequency is very similar to 4G, and by installing low-cost receivers and transmitters and boosting the signal into wi-fi, the engineers and scientists on the project say they have achieved “mid-mile connectivity”.
“Think of it as wi-fi,” says Karandikar, “but one that works over longer ranges of three to four kilometres.” Eventually, the project aims to link 640,000 Indian villages to broadband internet. Tests of an ATM machine in the villages too have been successful, opening up other possibilities once plugged into the internet. The project received a $125,000 boost on March 29 when it won Mozilla’s Equal Rating Innovation Challenge in Brussels, beating 100 submissions from 27 other countries. “The technology will be open source, which means that it will be accessible to anyone anywhere,” says Nikhil Pahwa, one of the judges and co-founder of SaveTheInternet.in (now InternetFreedom.in).
But policy hurdles still stand in the way. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has proposed delicensing V and E bands, which could be used to provide short haul wireless links, particularly for rural and semi-rural areas. If that happens, low cost 4G solutions could soon steer rural India onto the digital highway.