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India has done what no other country has: Made digital payments free, instant, and universal, and leads the world in mobile-data use. Yet, in one adjacent field we remain a laggard. Public Wi-Fi — the cheap, shared, last-mile connectivity that lets a citizen buy a little internet wherever she is — has barely taken root. India has around 4 lakh public hotspots. France, with a population a fraction of ours, has more than 13 million; the world has over 600 million. For a nation that prides itself on its digital public infrastructure, this is a gap worth explaining — and closing.
The idea was born in April 2016, in an email from Nandan Nilekani. Any consumer, he wrote, should be able to walk up to any Wi-Fi hotspot and connect with a single click — “like an Uber for hotspots” — and anyone with a spare connection could sell a little of it to a passer-by. At TRAI, we built exactly that: An open, interoperable architecture with no central gatekeeper, in which anyone could set up or aggregate a hotspot, and a single app would discover the nearest one, verify the user, take his few rupees through any wallet, and connect him seamlessly across every provider.
We called the retail outlet a Public Data Office, or PDO, and the analogy we kept returning to was the humble PCO — the public call office that put a telephone within walking distance of nearly every Indian by turning a shopkeeper into its keeper. The PDO was the PCO reborn for the internet: The corner shop or tea stall selling connectivity by the sachet, a rupee’s worth at a time. That is why I have always thought of it as the internet in a sachet — for the genius of the Indian market is that the poor do not buy the bottle; they buy the sachet.
TRAI issued a consultation paper in July 2016, submitted formal recommendations in March 2017, and piloted the idea with eight entities running some six hundred hotspots. The pilot worked: One-time registration, interoperability, easy payment — all proven. The Prime Minister himself was shown the system in June 2018 and was greatly taken with it; he wanted it launched within weeks. Yet it was not until December 2020 that the framework was finally approved by the Union cabinet, as PM-WANI — the Prime Minister’s Wi-Fi Access Network Interface.
Five years on, the promise remains largely unfulfilled. Why? The single biggest reason is the cost of backhaul: A small PDO is made to pay more for the very same fibre broadband that a household buys cheaply, which destroys the shopkeeper’s economics before he has sold a single sachet. Add to this a persistent official tenderness towards incumbent telecom operators, never enthusiastic about a million small competitors selling connectivity outside their control.
The commonest objection now is that mobile data is so cheap that nobody needs Wi-Fi by the sachet. It is plausible, and wrong. Data now comes bundled in fixed monthly plans priced from a couple of hundred rupees, which the poorest cannot always afford, and which are of little help to a student joining an online class when the family’s one data plan is on someone else’s phone. The sachet has not become unnecessary; it has merely been abolished by the operators’ tariff design, even as demand has exploded — online education, telemedicine, government services — precisely where mobile signal serves worst.
There is a strategic case too. Public Wi-Fi runs on unlicensed spectrum, sparing congested mobile networks the costly spectrum they buy at auction. Leaving a billion-plus people’s connectivity entirely to two or three mobile companies, besides, is a dangerous dependence on a duopoly. A dense, open, independent Wi-Fi layer is a strategic de-risking of the nation’s digital life — an alternative no single commercial interest can switch off.
What makes the delay especially galling is that the missing piece is already lying in the ground. BharatNet, begun in 2011 to carry optical fibre to every one of India’s 2.5 lakh gram panchayats, has absorbed more than Rs 48,000 crore — more than five times what Aadhaar cost — and reached over 2 lakh of them. Yet it returns almost nothing, for a great trunk of bandwidth with no retail distribution is a pipe with no taps. Even a fully monetised BharatNet will leave gaps in hilly, forested terrain fibre may never reach — and that is where Starlink and the other satellite-broadband entrants see a market; Reliance Jio, too, could plausibly carry backhaul, subject to regulatory clearances still being worked through.
The two failures are each other’s cure. BharatNet is a big pipe without a last mile; PM-WANI is a last mile starving for a cheap, big pipe. Converge them — let BharatNet act as a common carrier, selling bandwidth on fair, transparent terms to the small PDOs and aggregators, much as a power-transmission company carries electricity to its distributors — and you have, at a stroke, cheap rural broadband, a real alternative to the duopoly, and at last a use for the taxpayer’s fibre. It needs two things the state has withheld: A capped, transparent wholesale price, and enforceable service guarantees. TRAI’s June 2025 tariff order, capping what a PDO is charged for retail fibre, is a welcome first step that must be followed through.
None of this requires new invention: The architecture was sound from the first, the fibre is in the ground, and the need has only grown. What it requires is resolve — the government’s willingness to back a consumer-first, open network against the pull of powerful incumbents. The day a student in a small town, or a labourer far from home, buys a few rupees of the internet from the shop on the corner and thinks nothing of it will have been worth the wait. It is time to bring the internet in a sachet to every Indian.
The writer is a former chairman of TRAI and former secretary, Government of India. Views are personal
