Connecting the unconnected

— Puneet Chawla

Since Independence, India has taken incremental steps forward as most democracies do through policy interventions. Sometimes political will, imaginative bureaucracy and disruptive technologies can combine to create a policy which can be revolutionary and create a game changing shift in how society communicates, conducts business and consumes content. One such policy indeed was the New Telecom Policy 1999 (NTP99) which brought a revolution in Indian Telecom market. It helped the Indian Telecom industry to transform into to a multiplayer competitive market with life changing impact for every Indian.

On the turn of the century when the term millennial was not yet coined, the technology which defines millennial took root. It might be interesting to note that RailTel was formed around the same time in the year 2000 with objective of modernising Railway Signalling and Telecom and enable broad band and multimedia across the country.

In the early years, RailTel grew with the telecom industry and became a carrier’s carrier as the mobile networks grew much faster than their OFC networks.

The then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Bajpayee in the AGM of FICCI in 2000 said: “Railways are a key infrastructure whose better functioning will help the economy in a big way. However, they need urgent reforms. The management of the rails needs radical restructuring to separate rail operations from planning and policy making. Large investments in renovation and modernisation are required to improve safety standards. Clearly we need to increase the investible funds for the Railways through innovative, Non- traditional and commercially oriented methods. The creation of RailTel Corporation is the first step in this direction.”

With the opening of FDI in telecom around 2000, the telcos started accelerated roll out their own OFC networks and RailTel started diversifying to stay relevant. Over the years, the biggest challenge for the telecom players has been developing state-of-the-art telecom infrastructure to provide cutting edge service to users.

Overall, it has been a bumpy road owing to various road blocks, profitability of building infrastructure in rural areas being the major one. With 70% of the Indian population residing in tier 2 and 3 cities or villages, the paying capacity of people is very low. Investing a large amount of money for building telecom infra in these areas, especially the villages, was never a profitable option for the private telecom payers as the return on investment would have been very low. To solve this issue, the Government of India rolled out a number of ambitious projects to connect the unconnected with BharatNet being the largest of them. Te project envisages connecting all gram panchayats with optical Fibre Network bringing telecom infra to rural India.

RailTel is a proud partner of many of the government projects which is about connecting the rural disconnect, including BharatNet and National Knowledge Network, to name a few. But, for us, the most successful project in direction of achieving the Digital India dream is our station Wi-Fi project.

RailTel had capacity in the station but did not hold spectrum or access networks to take it to the communities.

So Railtel evolved two different strategies: one was to collaborate with entrepreneurs like local cable operators to deliver broadband to homes and offices, which we market under the brand name RailWire, and the second initiative was to create an impact by transforming the Indian Railway stations into the hubs of Digital inclusion. response to this Wi-Fi network has been phenomenal and as per data of December 2019, the number of user logins in this network is 2.5 crore consuming 10,242 TB data. While enabling high speed network access to all rail users, it also enables financial inclusion, access to the underprivileged for a range of government programs and generation of opportunities for local employment.