ConnectedIndians.com – Finally a Collective Effort to Boost Internet Penetration in India
I read the ET today (well I do it everyday, but that’s not the point) and saw this piece of news as an ad along with the knowledge forum article. Intel has launched a campaign to boost Internet penetration in India called ConnectedIndians.com. The effort named of course at the idea of connecting a billion Indians. The initiative has the biggest stakeholder’s in the Indian telecom and computing industry as sponsors and perhaps might be ‘the’ initiative to get the Internet moving beyond the metros in India. Domain-B has a more elaborate report on the initiative.
The website itself speaks about the initiative as -
Can a billion Indians get connected?
The Connected Indian Movement aims to be the catalyst for delivering the power of the Internet into the hands of a billion Indians. Intel is privileged to facilitate this effort, but its success will hinge on spirited public and private participation. Over the next few months we will mobilize people, resources & infrastructure to facilitate Internet adoption. Overtime, this collaboration will help build partnerships between people, Industries and stakeholders via a complete and connected ecosystem to accelerate the growth of internet and its benefits to the society.
The sponsors/partners to this movement include almost all the stakeholders of the industry who obviously stand to gain from better Internet penetration. So we have telecom providers like BSNL, Reliance and Tata Communications, computing and IT powers like Acer, ASUS, HCL, Lenovo, Wipro, Zenith, commerce beneficiaries like Croma and Ezone and computing learning solutions providers IL&FS, Edunte, NIIT and others. I don’t really know if it would have a major impact but the sheer size of brand and reach of these companies make this initiative noteworthy. Industry associations like the CII, MAIT have also shown their support to the initiative.
What is nice to see is everyone understanding the benefit that they stand to derive from IT growth but seeing beyond their individual glory to tie up with each other and come together on one platform. For a long time in many Internet and Telecom events we have seen people talk about how the numbers just don’t match for the Internet medium to persuade big numbers from business, perhaps such an initiative with its specific goal can set a precedent for more initiatives and make the whole process faster.
The website itself incorporate user opinions and views and has a community aspect like much of Intel’s other web based initiatives. And given the Pan Indian target the site is also available in Hindi and Tamil (we could have asked for more languages though..). Till now the community has ‘connected’ over 15,000 members, the goal of course being a billion. The salient aspect however of this initiative is the Net Yatra.
The Net Yatra is described as, “..Driven by the mission to connect citizens to information and ideas through the internet, a specially designed Connected Indians bus is traveling across India to educate people on how the Internet can make life easier for them.” The Net Yatra can be followed from http://www.connectedindians.com/netyatra.asp as it covers more cities and towns. Something tells me that the bus as a mode of transport is not just do with convenince or a play of coincidence to the fact that processors have buses for data transfer.
Perhaps as a sign of good times for the movement, we have also seen a Ficci report that suggests that Wireless and broadband use has increased by over 50% in the Apr-Nov gap (with broadband citing a significant 87% growth).
I hope this sets the web on the pedestal that it is supposed to be as a medium, though irony just struck as I lost my net connection just when I was about to publish this. Life on the broadband.
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Seems quite promising. I hope this works, would love to be a part of it. We would love to help them in any way we can.
i’ve been using dsl speed, it helps to tweak ur internet performance and boost dsl connection, easy to download and use ^_-