Paving Way for Digital India

Context: Pradhan Mantri Wireless Access Network Interface (PM-WANI) has the potential to revolutionise the way India accesses the internet.

India’s Successful innovation or solution: (such as Aadhaar or UPI)

• Features
  • Frugal: To improve affordability.
  • Interoperable: Helps in harnessing competition and thus create value for the consumers.
  • Easy to roll out: For the benefits to reach even the remotest areas.
• Building a successful solution in the digital age
  • Find solutions at microscopic levels: Unbundle a problem into manageable pieces, create robust and interoperable solutions for each part, and glue the components together through connectors called Application Programming Interface (API’s).
  • Leapfrogging digital technologies in India: tele-density of Mobile Tele-density stands at 90 per 100 people. (for landlines it never exceeded 7 per 100 people)
  • Frugal architectural innovation: Helps in making expensive infrastructure accessible. (When landlines were scarce, PCOs proliferated)
  • Increase in Internet subscribers: From 2015 to June of 2020, India became one of the fastest-growing internet markets in the world with a Cumulative Annual GrowthRate (CAGR) of 20%.
    • But there is a low percentage of wired internet subscribers:  Only 23 million wired internet subscribers. Despite excellent advances in 4G technology, wired connections still offer superior quality, reliability and throughput. 

Benefits of PM-WANI

• Unbundle three A’s — Access, Authorisation and Accounting: This is similar to Unified Payment Interface (UPI), which resulted in 3 Cs — greater convenience, higher confidence and lower costs.
• Liberalisation of Bandwidth: Enables a Kirana shop owner, a tea-stall vendor, or a Common Service Centre — to resell the internet to its customers without a licence and without fees.
  • These small vendors will be called Public Data Offices (PDOs).
• Abandoned the top-down approach: The distribution of endpoints of PM-WANI will be selected by entrepreneurs rather than being decided top-down.
• Authentication of users: based on robust identity infrastructure in the form of Aadhaar and DigiLocker.
  • This architecture also allows a central data balance and central KYC, that users can use inter-operably across all PDOs.
• Helpful to International travellers: They can take advantage of India’s connectivity, without paying exorbitant roaming charges to their home networks.
• Forward-looking in its design: A single-click, multi-device experience has been envisioned.
• For students: in rural areas can access offline content without using bandwidth.
• Economical: The cost of access over PM-WANI will be lesser than that of 4G.

Way forward

• Good execution: Without which PM-WANI will be merely an exciting concept on paper.
  • Thus it will revolutionise the way India accesses the internet and be a fillip to small businesses.
• Liberalise Other Service Providers (OSPs) regulations.

Conclusion:  India is paving the way for digital Small Medium Enterprises to go online without the burden of onerous compliances.