Internet in India : Eighteen But Yet to Mature

Internet in Youth and the Youth on the Internet

First-time voters would make up fifteen percent of the 800 million in the electoral list for the 2014 Parliamentary elections in India.With multipolar electoral contests being the norm rather than the exception, the 3-4% swing being attributed to these ‘new age' voters may well be the decisive factor! No wonder in this era of coalition governments, political parties and contestants are falling head over heels to woo them; and, social media is an integral part of that strategy.

Reasons for this are not far. The young people do use the Internet more often and for longer than others. It is also their key medium for communication, community engagement and increasingly, even for commerce.

What may come as a surprise, however, is that one out of every hundred voters in the 2014 elections was not even born when the Internet services debuted in India! Whether one calls a member of this community as ‘Millennial' or ‘Digital Native', more and more are joining the on-line community - every single day, every single moment.

A Brief History of Internet in India

Though perfunctory Internet access to, and, by select institutes and government entities had been around since the early 90s, it was only on the Independence Day in 1995 when Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL was the monopoly international long distance operator and a public sector entity; it is now known as Tata Communications Limited and a private sector entity) began offering Internet services to public at large, albeit in the six metro cities only. In fact, a year later, yes, bang on August 15, 1996, Lucknow became the seventh Indian city to have Internet access became available.

While the physical access is indeed crucial, this is just an enabler and it is things like the content, the community, the capacity building and the commerce that hold the real value in terms of usage. In fact, mere connectivity is like a hollow pipe and bandwidth like a flow of water, which if not used properly, would result in sheer wastage. At the same time, even if the current usage is low, it is better to plan, invest and build a scalable network - both in number of nodes, the bandwidth and the resilience in terms of redundant and efficient routing.

In the initial years, the Internet policy and regulation evolved in fits and starts - with two steps forward and one step back, with occasional side-steps as well, as chronicled in Broadband: The Seven Year Hitch.
As the first set of the ISP licenses become due for renewal today after their 15 year tenure and though the Internet in India has turned eighteen and in that sense a grown-up, it is worth reflecting to assess if it has really matured.

Lack of Availability Despite ISPs Galore

 

Most rural areas continue to be deprived of reliable Internet connectivity despite about 400 valid ISP licenses and many areas just do not have it. However, with the National Optical Fiber Backbone (NOFN) reaching all the gram panchayts, things should improve, especially in the domestic backbone and the ‘last mile' delivery.

Internet on the Go!

Just like elsewhere, initially the Internet access in India was also mostly through the desktops. Some of those who had computers would take Internet connection. While on the LAN cable, laptops and notebook were fine, one had to struggle with the fragile antenna on a PCMCIA card.
However, Intel's Celeron processor with built-in wi-fi brought about a refreshing ease for the users. Dongles and wi-fi helped expand the access through wireless. The paradigm changed to the extent that people started buying computers because they wanted to connect to the Internet.

Increasingly, majority of users access the Net on the mobile phones and tablets, bandwidth and patchy connectivity notwithstanding. Besides more affordable devices, the operators are also enabling this by offering low-value tariff plans and innovative tariff plans like short videos at one Rupee each through wide retail network and on-the-air simplified recharge options.

Domain names beyond .com and Roman script

Dot com continues to be the most popular generic top level domain (gTLD) but .org and .net too are increasing - not just in registration but in usage as well. However, the online registration of .IN by NIXI since 2005 made the country-code top level domain (ccTLD) easily accessible. Registrations have grown significantly but the usage is still way below potential.

National Internet Registry

It is gratifying to see fruition of the campaign for India's own National Internet Registry (NIR), initiated at the APNIC meeting in September, 2006. Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN), began functioning under NIXI and offers Internet addresses and Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) in 2013.

Legislation and Regulation

Numerous changes to the policy, law and regulation have come about. Enactment of the Information Technology Act was a watershed moment and provided legal framework for e-Commerce, the 2008 amendment was more focused on certain cyber-crimes while also achieving a better balance of liability for the third-party intermediaries.

TRAI Act 1997 paved the way for quasi-judicial sector regulator but the 2000 amendment created TDSAT as the settlement and appellate tribunal, while retaining TRAI as the sector regulator. Reduction of leased line tariffs - both for domestic and international, was perhaps the most significant enabler by the regulator for the growth and viability of the Internet, besides, of course, opening of the Internet telephony and several other enabling interventions.

Security and Privacy

With the ever-evolving threat landscape and the increasing use of the Internet, issues around security and privacy continue to be debated, discussed and deliberated, especially on the need of balancing (national) security and privacy as well as on the ticklish issues related to cross-border nature of the Internet. Though there are no easy solutions, one has to look beyond purely legislative solutions.

Despite the fact that the telecom network has always been depicted as a ‘cloud' in the network diagrams, discussions around the cloud often tend to go to the extremes. It is just that thanks to the increasing and more triangulated bandwidth, more affordable and better connectivity, cheaper and increasing storage and processing, the cloud economics is improving.

Content - By the Users, For the Users, of the Users

One of the earliest applications on the Internet was e-mail and the traffic pattern was symmetric. With the advent of online publishing thanks to the creation of the web, it soon became highly asymmetric. In fact, even today most service providers offer upload speed just about one-fourth of the download speed, when seen from the users' perspective.

However, thanks to the user-generated content the Internet traffic, especially on the social media platforms, is again becoming more symmetric in the last mile. Internet is perhaps the best example of ‘prosumers' (producers-cum-consumers), a term coined in 1980 by the futurologist Alvin Toffler in his famous book ‘The Third Wave'.

Commerce

It was not unusual to listen in 1999 from the new-age messiahs that within five years, e-Commerce as a term would cease to exist. Why? "Well, all commerce would be e-Commerce!" While this prophecy is yet to be fulfilled, the accelerated use and adoption of e-Commerce in the country is noteworthy.

Whether people go online for convenience (railway booking), choice (especially from Tier 2 & 3 towns) or collective bargaining (better discounts), the trend seems irreversible. More than any technical innovation, it is the Cash-on-Delivery and Try-and-Buy type of business model innovations that are fueling this drive. All the same, some of these practices indeed burn a huge hole in the pocket of the e-tailers and few are likely to sustain and scale beyond the initial funding by the venture capitalists and private equity players.

The Reserve Bank of India was the first regulator anywhere to mandate two-factor authentication for online payments and while this has indeed restrained frauds significantly, the failure rate is quite high, at times putting off the consumers. The ecosystem players need to make it easier for the consumers to trust and transact, while also reducing their own dependency on the costlier cash transactions.

e-Governance

National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) is making steady progress and thanks to continuous updates on eTaal, metrics of interactions is transparently available in real-time - well, almost. While the e-Governance services and applications are creating the demand-side pull, the infrastructure of the State Data Centre (SDC), the State Wide Area Networks (SWAN) and the Common Service Centre (CSC) is providing the much-needed supply-side enablement. With initiatives like Aadhaar and the Direct Benefit Transfer, this would only gain more pace.

Internet Governance

Multi-stakeholder participation has always been a strong feature of Internet governance, more so since the launch of the Internet Governance Forum in 2006 under the aegis of the United Nations. India had hosted the third IGF in Hyderabad in 2008 and the eighth IGF concluded recently in Bali. India's participation at IGF and other such platforms has been growing through it is nowhere close to the desired level.

Miles and Miles to Go

Despite the tremendous growth of the Internet in India, just about one of eight Indian citizen is online. If we adapt and adopt Internet well, it will not only aid in achieving faster and more inclusive growth but would also lead to better governance, overall furthering the cause of democracy, empowerment and transparency.

20 little known facts about Internet in India

1.Sukh Ram was the Minister of Communications in the cabinet of late Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, when the incumbent public sector monopoly international long distance operator VSNL launched Internet services on the Independence Day in 1995 across six metro cities. Incidentally, Beni Prasad Verma was the Minister of Communications in 1996 when Lucknow became the seventh city in India to have Internet access. Besides TCP/IP account, VSNL used to offer a ‘shell account' as well for text only browsing, with an especially discounted tariff for students.

2.The government did announce guidelines for entry of private ISPs on January 15, 1998 but TRAI (it was a quasi-judicial body before the 2000 amendment to the TRAI Act) stayed the same in February, 1998. Though the Delhi High Court did vacate the stay subsequently, it underwent a thorough overhaul, thanks to the Prime Minister's IT Task Force. Had the January 1998 policy been implemented, your ISP would have to seek specific permission from government, before offering any new service or application.

3.The then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee himself was holding the charge of Communications when the licensing for Internet services began on November 6, 1998. He also launched India's first private Internet access service later that month in Hyderabad. Annual license fee payable under the ISP license policy of 1998 was all of one Rupee and ‘telephony on the Internet' was the only service not allowed thereunder.

4.There are about 400 valid ISP licenses in vogue while almost same number of licenses have been surrendered or canceled. However, according to TRAI less than 200 ISPs are actually offering services.

5.There used to be a telecom license for providing e-mail services prior to the ISP policy. Around 10 licensees - including VSNL, used to provide services mostly to corporate clients and for some time, even incoming mail used to be charged to the recipient.

6.As per the Business Allocation Rules, licensing of Internet services is handled by Department of Telecommunications (DoT) while the promotion of Internet, e-Governance and e-Commerce come under the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY).

7.Late Shammi Kapoor (yes, the actor) was the first chairman of the Internet Users Club of India (IUCI) in 1995 and he often used to look for recipes online. Membership of the club, though, was reportedly on the invite-only basis.

8.First cyber café in India became operational in 1995 at the Brigade Road in Bangalore. From an estimated number exceeding one lakh a few years back, there were just about 8000 cyber café across the country early this year, according to TRAI. Seemingly, the Common Service Centres (CSCs) under the National e-Governance Plan are not counted in this category.

9.Sify, India's first private ISP to launch service, became the second Indian company to list at NASDAQ in October 1999 after Infosys that had listed in March of the same year.

10.Acquisition of IndiaWorld Communications Pvt. Ltd. (company founded by IIT Bombay graduate Rajesh Jain had a clutch of India-specific sites like samachar for news, khel for sports, bawarchi for recipes and khoj for search) by Sify in November, 1999 for Rs. 499 crores was the catalyst for the first round of dot-com boom in India - a trend that continues to play time and again.

11.Caltiger.com had become India's leading ISP for some time in terms of number of subscriptions, thanks to its free Internet access plan!

12.Rules for blocking exist under the Information Technology Act. However, it was only after a writ petition was filed in Delhi High Court in 1998 that VSNL opened routes to Vocaltec (an Israeli pioneer of Internet telephony technology) and certain other VoIP sites.

13.All wireless usage needs license from the Wireless Planning & Coordination (WPC) wing of Department of Telecommunications unless specifically exempt. While one does not need a license from WPC for wi-fi and Bluetooth now, outdoor usage for wi-fi and Bluetooth was de-licensed in 2005 and indoor usage (as well as for contiguous campus) was de-licensed only in 2003. In fact, one could not even obtain license for such frequency hopping spread-spectrum technologies at the turn of the millennium!

14.National Telecom Policy, 1994 had absolutely no reference to Internet. Besides mentioning about the ISP licensing policy of 1998 as a matter of background, the New Telecom Policy, 1999 included the objective of Internet access to all district headquarters by 2000 under the heading ‘Universal Service Obligation' and reiterated that the Internet telephony would continue to be disallowed at that moment.

15.In a rare and so fare unique occasion, the government had sought comments from public at large before accepting and implementing TRAI's recommendations on Internet Telephony with effect from April 1, 2002. India continues to be perhaps the only country where unrestricted Internet telephony is legally permitted (under the Unified Access Service License since 2006) but where this is not yet legally available!

16.Following the Broadband Policy in October 2004, for some time broadband was the fastest growing telecom service (yes, even compared to mobile connections), albeit on a smaller base.

17.Though more than a hundred satellite gateways were approved in-principle and several of these were indeed commissioned since 1999, not a single gateway has been granted formal approval yet. Incidentally, as of March, 2013 total international bandwidth across all the ISPs was 745 Gbps, while VSNL had begun Internet services in 1995 with just five international links of 64 kbps each (yes, all of 320 kbps!).

18.Encryption on the Internet in India is freely allowed up to 40 bit symmetric key length only since August, 1999. Though use of longer key lengths is permissible with the government approval and that too, only after submission of the key pair. However, the process thereof is yet to be notified.

19.Broadband Policy 2004 had specified 128 kbps download speed as the norm for broadband and set an ambitious target of 20 million connections by 2010. Despite the fact that according to TRAI, 162 ISPs were providing broadband service in August, 2003 the total number of subscribers had grown to just 15.36 million and growing at just above 3% per annum. All the same, one out of six mobile connections (about 150 million out of a total 900 million) is already being used for Internet access - a trend that is only going to accelerate with proliferation of smart phones and high-speed wireless networks.

20.Though as a country, India has the third largest Internet user base, none of the 22 languages listed in the eighth schedule to the Indian constitution figure in the global top 20 languages on the web.

 

By Deepak Maheshwari

(The author has been closely associated with the development of the Internet Economy in India for more than 15 years and is a public policy professional)