Of Modi's digital India

               I am on Facebook, but I hardly log in it. The News-Feed are filled

with all the “happy” post about my friends, which makes me burn from

inside. Because “happy is overrated” (courtesy my current favorite

series 'Shameless') . So yesterday my mommy dearest (who logs into

Facebook everyday) showed me her News-Feed filled of people, who have

changed their dp with a tricolor filter. She told me that it has been

launched by Facebook as a initiative for #ISupportDigitalIndia (because

every good change start with a #, right?) . And now everywhere we can

see Indian people becoming cyber-patriotic and changing their dp with

this new tool. Because hey, when you need to change India, the first

thing you need to do is change your Profile picture! Oh and by

changing, I mean strictly technologically. Socially we still choose

remain ignorant because as far as I remember very few people choose to

change their dp with rainbow filter, to show their support for the

LGBT community.

    The initiative is undoubtedly good. We are in an era where everything

is getting 'Digitalised'. Be it money transaction, communication or even

our beloved Bollywood. I really liked the idea of making the “Brain

Drain” as the “Brain Gain”, as sharing of information is now possible

even from the seven seas. As our Prime Minister explained, with help

of digitization, we can help curb the corruption as it bring

transparency and obviously helps in Indian getting connected to

internet and use its ultimate power. All these ideas sounds too good

to be true for a country, whose citizen’s still lack basic amenities.

I’m not saying that Government shouldn’t initiate such great plans,

but they should make announcement based on ground realities only. 

     Few months ago I read an article that how engineers are having hard time

in laying optical fiber in Varanasi(constituency of Honorable Prime

minister ), because monkeys kept destroying it, and the locals don’t

want the monkeys to be thrown away in cages because they consider them

sacred. We are talking about increasing bandwidth and providing 4G

networks, but in reality we rarely get 3G networks (which also fails

to deliver 1mbps speed). I’m still waiting for the chirpy Airtel girl

to visit my town and challenge me. Well how is she going to download

in 4G when we barely get 2G network in my town??

And why is Facebook helping India to get Digitalized? Well, it’s pure

business and not philanthropy.They are trying to introduce the infamous Internet.org 

which “claims” to provide free internet but

actually poses a great threat to net neutrality. First, it

would be available to only a particular operator(in India's case, it's Reliance)

The Internet.org would only give access to 50 partner

websites and thus restricting us from whatever we want to surf on

internet, which is a major violation of Net Neutrality. The start-up

would heavily pay it's price, and as the sites that would pay more would

obviously find it's place in the internet provider's list.

Congratulations to the Bansal brothers of Flipkart for making it to

the Forbes list. I hope they are not the only pair of siblings from

India to make it to the Forbes, because we all know how these

manipulated free internet causes threat to the start-up.

All said, Digital India is a great but distant dream!