Elections: New Mantra – Roti, Kapda, Makaan aur Broadband

It is that time of the year in India – it is legal for every political party to make false promises. General Election 2009 is heating up. Political parties have started releasing their manifesto.

BJP was the first party to announce their intention to make broadband available to “everyone” at Rs 200. This means there isn’t going to be any quotas based on caste to avail broadband at Rs 200. They should get some good Karma points for this line item.

Congress has come up with a similar but it is rural specific,

We will connect all villages to a broadband network in three years time

While connectivity across the country has increased manifold in recent years, the Indian National Congress pledges to bring the fruits of the IT revolution to more cities and towns.  It also pledges to connect every village to a broadband network within three years. This will help locate new, non-agricultural jobs in villages and open vast new opportunities for our rural youth. Thus the vision of Rajiv Gandhi – the use of IT for rural transformation — will be realized in even greater measure. Already, IT is being used in areas like computerization of land records but we now promise a bolder, time-bound initiative.

Congress has been in power for the last 5 years. What ‘prevented’ them from implementing “Rajiv Gandhi’s IT vision”? The present govt has postponed the auction of 3G spectrum several times. Very disappointing. Anyway I would have liked to see them pushing broadband to a great extend. BSNL has done a good job in increasing the broadband usage.

Let us assume Congress can take broadband to the rural areas. But does this region have sufficient power to switch on the PC? People talk to me about internet being big in Tier-III cities in India but for some reason I feel in the near future it will be Tier-I and Tier-II cities. Tier-III has to wait but if I am wrong I would be the most happy person as our language content would be surely consumed from Tier-III cities 🙂

CPI(M) is completely silent on broadband/internet.  Not too surprised about it as CPI(M) focuses on the core issues the country faces. That is their ideology and one has to respect it but slowly adapting to changing times would be good. CPI(M) has a killer web designer for sure – if they could spend on their 2009-election specific site why couldn’t they revamp their main site? (Update: Finally CPIM has updated their main site)

Conclusion

We welcome the two major parties “mentioning” broadband in their manifesto. Let us visit the ‘implementation’ part later 😉 Both parties have been way behind in adapting internet within their own parties – why haven’t they published the details of their candidates they are fielding?  Is it because lesser said the better of most if not all of their candidates 😉

The bad news is that whatever comes into the manifesto surely never gets done. Where are the poor getting Roti, Kapda aur Makaan (food, roof and clothing)?