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Digital India, a broad initiative aimed at connecting citizens and promoting digital literacy across the country, as well as digitizing government records, was a big part of Modi's campaign promise to "take the nation forward - digitally, and economically". An optimistic Modi government moved up a deadline to install the most basic foundation of the program, a network of optical fiber, to December 2016, but data from the department of electronics and information technology suggests this may be unrealistic, as the vast majority of cables have yet to be installed. In 2014, just 18 percent of Indians were Internet users, according to the World Bank; however, sites such as Internet Live Stats suggest this percentage may have increased to as much as 35 percent by 2016.
Indian youth use the internet at a cyber cafe in Allahabad, India.
But the government has a long road ahead to digitize their population of more than one billion citizens. Financing purchases of equipment, such as computers and wireless routers for government offices, as well as installing fiber optic cables, is one challenge. But educating the population is another persistent one. Aakash Solanki, a University of Chicago fellow working in the education department of the state government of Haryana, says one cannot happen without the other. "All of this work kind of happens [in parallel]," he told VOA. "The Indian government is faced with this challenge of having to do pretty much everything at once."
An Indian man, left, uses his mobile phone as people walk past in New Delhi, India.
The main problem Solanki notes in his local work, however, is the lack of digital literacy among government workers themselves. Both in the context of digitizing government records and of creating education policy to provide citizens the skills to use new technology, digital literacy is lacking. He says many of the government workers tasked with creating policy are in their 50s and do not themselves know how to use technology they are tasked with teaching. "The government needs to help itself, right from the topmost officers down to the clerks there is a massive skills gap," he said. "If they themselves are not equipped with the bare bones, bare minimum digital literacy then how will the state do its job?"
The gap
Microsoft and Facebook announced the move Thursday, saying the 6,600-kilometer "MAREA" cable, named for the Spanish word for "tide," will stretch from the U.S. East Coast state of Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. From Spain, the cable would link to hubs in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and other parts of Europe. The companies said construction of the cable will begin in August and finish by October 2017. The cable is expected to carry up to 160 terabits of bandwidth per second, about 16 million times the bandwidth of a U.S. home internet connection.
Microsoft Corporation and Facebook Inc. plan to build an undersea cable to meet growing demand for high-speed online services.
Their announcement comes nearly two years after Google announced a similar deal with five Asian companies to develop a trans-Pacific cable network connecting the U.S. with Japan. Underwater data centers are seen as a possibility for storing and managing huge amounts of data while using marine energy resources to keep the data centers cool.
Microsoft, Facebook to Build Undersea Data Cable across Atlantic
