More Ministers Active on Twitter than Journalists

Aruna Sundararajan, secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), was at the launch of the report titled, Index of Internet Readiness of Indian States, published by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Nielsen.

Speaking about the report which found Delhi to be the most ready to embrace the benefits of Internet followed by Karnataka and Maharashtra, Secretary Sundararajan said, “We don’t usually get a disaggregate picture, usually we get reports and figures for India as a whole. So this is a good initiative. It’s good to have state wise, source wise and industry wise ranking of internet readiness. This is a fairly detailed picture that has been handed to us for the first time. This was needed because India is a diverse country and there is huge variation and disparity in distribution of resources.

There are some wild cards we didn’t expect to see have progressed so much along the internet readiness index. Majority of the states as is indicated by data is engaging fairly intensively in technology projects.”

She continued on the vast strides India seems to be making on the digital front she said, “The country is rapidly digitizing. It’s one of the fastest to do so in the world. And we are just waking up to the fact. Typically two sectors in India who are slow to register new updates are the government - as the media are so fond of pointing out, and data pools for the country’s development and progress.”

Indicating how much more responsive the Indian states and centre politicos are she started off by acquiescing, “Lot of the technological advancements could have happened faster, but at least it is happening now,” which was followed by, “The government may be called slow but almost every minister is on Twitter, I’m not sure if even the media personnel are so up to date on their social media connectivity. That’s just an indication of how seriously each state government and the centre is about making India a technologically developed country with a population that is ready to reap the benefits of the Internet.

There is much more happening in other states. Chhattisgarh will be doubling amount of telecom infrastructure and plans to hand out smartphones for free; Andhra Pradesh has a Fibre Grid project initiated to bring internet to homes at high speeds starting at 10Mbps and Kerala will be one of the first states to declare Internet as a fundamental right of a person.

There’s of course more to be done. I will be the first person to admit to that. India is such a vast country that no matter how much we do it always feels like it isn’t enough.”