Digital India: Hmmm..........

Greetings internet or my 8 friends who actually read this blog(Hey guys!!). So I have been inactive on the blog for a quite a while, now this is the part where I give you guys a genuine reason as to why I was inactive but you know I had stuff to do. Now then that's out of the way lets come to the point here.
Not so long ago our beloved prime minister took a trip to the United States(I've been told not to joke about this). While on this trip he attended a Q & A session at Facebook headquarters in menlo park,California. Now unless you have been living under a rock this particular interaction between our prime minister and Mr. Zuckerberg got insane amount of media coverage, the interview had it all from the discussion over a digital India to our PM getting teary eyed on talking about his mother.

Source:AP

The session itself was great but got a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons, it was when Mark Zuckerberg decided to support the Digital India by changing his display picture which had a tri-colour filter . After this the Indian Facebook community lost it's shit and everyone had this very same filter on their pictures and were suddenly supporters of digital India.(Yup that guy who read my article on net neutrality and came up to me and said that "Abbe ye tune AIB wale video se copy kiya hai na?" was now supporting a digital India). Now the thing is nobody had a real issue with this I  mean who is not going to support digital India(FREE WIFI HELL YEAH!!)but what most people did not realize was that Zukcerberg was trying to promote(or what was claimed) Facebook's very own service internet.org. To make things worse a picture revealing the source code of the tool came out and the code had the words Internet.org in it.

Photo: http://imgur.com/r1oftGU

      Now Facebook came out with an official statement claiming that they were not trying to promote internet.org but it was an honest mistake on the programmer's part. The question here is was this true? Honestly nobody knows I mean it was a very specific mistake on Facebook's part but lets not dwell on that.
 Lets talk about the digital India initiative, what's up with that? Well one of the biggest requirements on that front is telecom infrastructure. 3G was first introduced in India around 2011-2012 and we barely get these services(But if you are on airtel you probably would have read this article already right? 4GGGG!!). Now this shows the rate of development, under the digital India campaign by 2016 the National Optical Fiber Network(NOFN) should be implemented which will be connecting all the Gram panchayats of the villages. As of right now there is an 8 member committee appointed by........ wait for it...... yup you guessed it the Department of Telecommunications(DoT). The very same authority is overseeing digital India that brought us the 2G scam and almost took away net neutrality, ohhh the irony. Now when all this was happening google also announced that they will help and make 500 railway stations in India WiFi enabled. 
The thing is all the companies in the world can try and help us to achieve digital India but it can only be achieved if the government authorities take the proper steps in the direction of making it possible. Lets start by making amends to the current technologies rather then jumping to the next big thing. Let us hope one day we actually do get a truly free and digital India.(In the mean time seriously hope and pray that airtel 4G wali girl shows up....apparently she already is in Digital India.)