Other states should follow Punjab on 4G

At an investor summit in Punjab, Mukesh Ambani, head of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) and Sunil Mittal, head of Bharti Airtel, promised to invest a total of Rs 6,500 crore to roll out advanced 4G telecom services. The government has assured help, by offering trenching rights at uniform rates to lay optical fibre in the state. If the promises become reality, Punjab will be the first state in India to have functional 4G services across its territory. Other states should take note. The benefits of high speed data networks are many: education levels can improve as lessons or indeed, entire courses, for various subjects can be streamed online. Medical advice and services can be similarly delivered. These services can also speed up financial inclusion, if regulation loosens up to enable mass virtual ebanking services.

Other changes are less easy to predict. For example, high speed communications on mobile devices are changing the way political campaigns are conducted. Recent polls in five states saw a large amount of campaigning go online and many people followed televised campaigns on their mobile phones. More disturbingly, during the August-September riots in Muzaffarnagar, morphed pictures were circulated on mobile apps to create panic and stoke hatred among people.

Yet, there is no reason to despair. On balance, the rapid spread of mobile communications has been a great boon for Indians. It has allowed fishermen access to instant weather reports and prices in fish markets, farmers now get price quotes from several markets for their produce and people can stay in touch with friends and family nearly round the clock. The addition of 3G services added data to this voice revolution, but speeds are nowhere as high as they can go with 4G. Today, data transfer speeds are low even in most urban centres. With 4G and fiber-optic backbones, speeds can become blazing fast, across India. Once services of this quality become widespread, India’s data revolution will kick off, transforming India’s productive capacity and society in general.