At a time when the Government of India is pushing the Digital India initiative, the recent statistics revealed by the United Nations in its broadband penetration ranking is not encouraging.
India's broadband penetration ranking has slipped to 155 from 113, according to the State of Broadband 2015 report by the UN.
However, the report also had some good news. The number of people with broadband access on mobile phones has gone up to 5.5 per cent of the population when compared with 3.2 per cent figure in the year 2013.
According to some sources, currently, the total number of unique mobile subscribers is between 3.7-5 billion.
According to the report by the UN, some experts are considering this as an indication that the digital divide that is currently prevalent in the world might soon be bridged.
Though the situation is slowly improving but digital divide is still persistent in terms of access to broadband internet, including the challenges of extending last-mile access to infrastructure and facilities to rural and remote communities.
Only 43% of the world’s population is currently online with some form of regular access to the internet revealed the recent data released by International Telecommunication Union's (ITU). This automatically means that 57% or some 4.2 billion of the world's people still do not have regular access to the internet.
Hence, an initiative like Digital India is surely the need of the hour. How successful will the initiative be is something that we will have to wait and watch. Keep checking this space as we keep a close watch on the story.
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