Recently I came across a news item which said that The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is providing $150 million to expand mobile phone coverage in rural areas in India. This is good news indeed. The agency has decided to fund the construction of 17,100 more cell towers to strengthen mobile phone coverage in the Subcontinent. In spite of drastic growth in telecommunication sector, we suffer from a critical lack of communication infrastructure in rural areas. Its sad to learn that out of 600,000 villages in the country, about 7 per cent do not even have landline phone connections. The coverage in rural India remains very poor with only about half the towns and one sixth of the villages covered so far. News papers report said that total subscriber base in the year 2007 including landline and mobile services in the country was about 273 million.
On one hand it would be nice if rural India is well networked as it would help in taking tele-medicine to the remote corner of the country. Farmers will be able to get the latest development in agriculture. Students would be the highest beneficiaries as they can study various courses online, get to know more about higher education. People like us sitting in rural India will be able to know stock movements and we can also participate in trading and make some money.
Many many thanks to technology that made everything possible.
