The Internet Is A Right, Not A Technology

When the pandemic hit in India, many of the country’s policies around vaccine roll-outs, online education and welfare services assumed universal Internet access and literacy. Yet, only 60 percent of households are connected, making essential services inaccessible to nearly one third of the population or more – a pattern of exclusion we’ve seen repeated around the world, and exacerbated in rural areas.

Since 2002, Ashoka Senior Fellow Osama Manzar’s Digital Empowerment Foundation has been building community-driven digital infrastructure across rural India. They have mobilized more than 20 million people to bring Internet connections and digital literacy to roughly 100 million people. Subhashish Panigrahi sat down with him to explore their plans to universalize Internet access as a human right.

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Osama Manzar: Over the last 25 years, the Internet has changed from being something that’s nice to have in your pocket, to a necessity. And yet, half the world is still unconnected and most of those unconnected people live in India. To give you a real picture of India, some 60 percent of the country is online. The picture changes when we look at urban India, which is over-connected, versus rural India, which is largely under-connected. So, more than 60 to 70 percent of rural India is not connected meaningfully.

Subhashish Panigrahi: You’ve dedicated the last 20 years to this issue of access. Why?

Manzar: India moved very fast to making all essentials in life dependent on connectivity, whether it’s authentication through biometrics, e-banking, or e-commerce, the Internet has become a necessity in the last five to 10 years. Even though more than 60 to 70 percent or more of rural India is unconnected, their life is still dependent on the Internet. They can’t access food, health, and other essentials without connectivity. The only thing they get without connectivity is misinformation, and fake news. That’s the irony. People get rumors and hearsay but not connectivity.  That’s why it’s very, very important for the entire civil society, governments and corporates to understand the meaning of this dependency on connectivity. Connectivity or access is essential for people to exercise their human rights and harness new opportunities.

Panigrahi: Digital Empowerment Foundation has contributed to changing that reality in a massive way, bringing connectivity to more than 100 million people. How did that happen?

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Manzar: The most important thing we’ve done is define our purpose not as connecting individual households, but by building community-level, village-level access. We get local communities to use frugal technologies, methodologies, and regulatory opportunities to create community networks. And we leverage existing infrastructure. For example, we build resource centers – public access points with lots of computers, tablets, biometrics, banking services, and education services available. Safe spaces where people can just walk in without hesitation. And these are managed by local entrepreneurs. So today, we have reached about 1,200 such locations across the country, where entrepreneur-driven, broadband-enabled Community Resource Centers are available. And 80 percent of the entrepreneurs are women, so they are also fighting the digital gender divide. Our experience is that wherever there is a woman involved, you have a better output, better accountability, better responsibility, and minimum problems. We also train barefoot engineers in bulk. People who are trained to build Wi Fi networks and solve internet connectivity issues locally. They can erect their own towers and find their own solution.

Panigrahi: And much of this, you’ve been able to scale through national policy changes, right?

Manzar: Yes. In 2011, we helped create the National Digital Literacy Mission – a national plan to ensure that every single household in India has at least one digitally literate person. We also helped the government and private sector create Common Service Centers across the country. These are village-level, entrepreneurially run kiosks to provide government services to the people. Another piece of good news came during the pandemic, when the government announced that you can now literally bypass all the bottlenecks of becoming an Internet Service Provider. So, any individual, any shop can buy internet and sell internet without having to pay for licensing fees. We had been working on this for years. This is the kind of scale I am talking about. We do not achieve this alone but by creating the policy environment and the entrepreneurship environment for people to do it on their own.

Panigrahi: What needs to come next?

Manzar: First, we need to stop understanding the Internet as tech. It’s a tool of necessity. For any developed country like India, where a large population is not connected, we have to stop relying just on the Ministry of IT to fix the access question. Why don’t we look at the Ministry of Health as having its own share of responsibility to connect all village health centers with video conferencing? That would make life so much easier for the grassroot level to talk to doctors anywhere in the country and solve their problems, because 80 percent of health access is about preventive health and not curative health – and that doesn’t require high tech solutions, just an internet connection. Same with education. We have 1.4 million schools, about 7 million teachers and roughly 320 million children. Why doesn’t the education ministry take the responsibility of making broadband Wi-Fi available in each and every school campus of the country. Why? We could apply the same thinking to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises, and the list goes on.

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So going forward, we have a very clear-cut agenda to continue to make the unconnected connected. We are focusing on 100,000 villages, which are on the margins of connectivity. Another emerging agenda is addressing the problem of authoritarianism, misinformation, fake news, human rights violations, and so on and so forth, for those who are connected. We want to bring sanity and safety online.

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Osama Manzar is the founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation, based in Delhi. Follow on Twitter.

Subhashish Panigrahi leads Ashoka’s Law for All in India.

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This conversation was condensed and edited. Watch the full conversation & browse more insights on Tech & Humanity.

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