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DUNGE, India: The day started well for Sayi Gharat. The nine-year-old schoolgirl managed to connect easily to her online science class, as she sat on a daybed in her grandmother's home in western India.
But Sayi knew she would not be able to stay in the same spot for long due to the shaky mobile internet connection she relied on for her education as classes in Dunge village and across India moved online when COVID-19 struck in March 2020.
\"Sometimes the network is good, sometimes it's not good: she has to move from one room to another, from one corner to another, and even go outside,\" Sayi's grandmother, Chandrakamalkar Gharat, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Two years on, Sayi is back at school, but staying online all day remains a challenge for her and tens of millions of others with poor connectivity in rural India, where the digital divide https:\/\/news.trust.org\/item\/20210423005445-p5ly8 hampers education, livelihoods and healthcare access.
\"It's very hard for her - we sometimes wonder if it's worth the trouble,\" Gharat said.
There are currently more than 800 million internet subscribers in the nation of 1.3 billion people, according to the telecom regulatory authority (TRAI). Yet in rural India, only about 38% of the population is connected to the internet.
The government has made universal broadband a priority under its Digital India programme to improve governance through technology, with projects such as the Bharat Net rural broadband project aimed at connecting about 650,000 villages nationwide.
But digital inclusion \"continues to remain a distant reality for most parts of rural India\", marred by delays in implementation, and a lack of access and digital literacy, according to a report from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), a policy think-tank.
That might now change due to recent policy moves including easier approvals for satellite broadband<\/a> network rollouts, and the imminent launch of satellite broadband from India's Bharti Airtel and Jio<\/a> Platforms, Elon Musk's Starlink, and others.
\"With the saturation of urban markets, there is keen interest among service providers to increase rural subscribership,\" said Mansi Kedia, a fellow at ICRIER, and a telecoms and internet expert.
\"But rural connectivity should look beyond the dominant technology - optical fibre and mobile communications. The use case for satellite broadband is the strongest in rural areas - it can help achieve connectivity at much lower costs,\" she said.