New Delhi: India is reinvigorating an $18 billion campaign to provide fast internet connections for all, with a "digital week" aimed at popularising Prime Minister Narendra Modi`s campaign promise to connect 250,000 villages in India by 2019.
The government`s tech push, which plans to provide electronic governance and universal phone connectivity across the country, aims to bridge India`s digital divide, bringing in large investments in technology manufacturing.
But apart from a handful of headline-grabbing initiatives - free wifi at the Taj Mahal, for example - the push to connect India and drive a national fibre optic network, first approved by the last government in 2011, has made slow progress.
"Now we are at a place where we can take off," said a spokesman for Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad. "The idea is to bridge the gap between haves and have-nots of services and deliverables."
The digital week will involve citizen awareness programmes. But officials say a plan will also be announced for "billions of dollars" of investment, most likely in manufacturing - critical for a government which badly needs to create more jobs, at a faster rate.
The plan aims to stop net imports of technology and electronics by 2020, while creating over 100 million jobs.
India`s first cyber premier, Modi has used social media and particularly Twitter, where he has 13 million followers, to style himself as a leader in touch with technology.
With a growing economy and falling handset prices, India is one of the fastest growing smartphone markets in the world, and Modi is looking to harness India`s potential for social development in fields like education and health.
But the challenge is great.
India`s average Internet speed was ranked 115th globally in the first quarter of the year, among countries studied by services provider Akamai Technologies.
India had just a little over 100 million broadband subscribers at the end of April, out of a population of close to 1.3 billion, according to the sector regulator, which considers Internet connections with minimum download speeds of 512 kbps.
A telecom ministry panel, by comparison, said in March it wants the digital push to establish affordable broadband connectivity of 2 Mbps to 20 Mbps "for all households" by 2017.