Updated Aug. 20, 2015 5:42 a.m. ET
NEW DELHI—India’s Communications Ministry has big plans to connect hundreds of millions of villagers to the Internet. But for now, it is struggling to conquer email.
In a cramped government office, a secretary tells a visitor that it will take 15 minutes for an email she sent to arrive in his inbox. The local broadband connection is poor, he explains.
When the message does arrive, he prints it and carries it to his boss, Aruna Sundararajan, head of Bharat Broadband Network Ltd., the state enterprise spearheading India’s Web-expansion push. Ms. Sundararajan prefers to have some of her work email delivered by hand.
This is where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of a “Digital India” meets reality.
In early July, the leader of the world’s largest democracy outlined ambitious plans to get rural Indians onto the information superhighway—in large part by ramping up a long-delayed effort to connect hundreds of thousands of villages to the national Internet backbone using fiber-optic cable. The original 2013 target date for completion has been shunted back to 2019.
“India may have missed the industrial revolution, but will not miss the IT revolution,” Mr. Modi said, pledging to hook up 600 million rural Indians for online access to government services, education, e-commerce, banking and health care.
Accomplishing that is a tall order. Fiber-optic cables—which transmit data at high speeds and at a lower cost than satellite or spectrum technology—can be difficult to put down in hard-to-reach areas. The installation program that started in 2011 is woefully behind schedule: Just 1% of the planned 250,000 central village hubs are connected to the Internet, according to the government.
Mr. Modi is trying to kick the project into high gear by slashing red tape. The premier also set up the Committee on the National Fibre Optic Network to evaluate the previous government’s plan to lay 372,000 miles of last-mile cable at a cost of $3.1 billion. It has issued a report saying almost three times as much cabling is required and that the price tag for the government will rise to about $11.2 billion.
“The old plan was a rural road, this is a broadband highway, a superhighway,” Ms. Sundararajan said.
The committee also recommended allowing greater participation by state governments and the private sector in the construction and maintenance of a network that so far has been in the hands of a few state-owned behemoths. The proposals are awaiting cabinet approval.
“The private sector is ready to go,” said Ankit Agarwal, global head of telecom products at Pune-based Sterlite Technologies Ltd. EQSTRTECH -0.41 % , which is one of the government’s main cable suppliers.
Private firms are expected to deliver and operate the village hubs’ fiber-optic networks in 10 of India’s 29 states—including some of its largest—and lay cable in at least three others, according to the network committee’s report.
Jaideep Ghosh, a partner at KMPG India who focuses on telecoms, said the industry wasn't “overly excited to take part.” He cited the expected slow pace of the installation and that telecommunications companies have already reached the most-lucrative population centers. Phone and cable companies “are focused on markets where money can be made.”
Work in India is speeding up. More than 11,500 miles of optical fiber have been laid between April and June this year, a huge improvement from the same period a year ago, when around 250 miles of fiber was installed.
But the task ahead remains gargantuan. In 2013, 1.06 billion Indians were still without Internet access, according to a report by McKinsey & Co. Internet penetration was 15% in India, compared with 46% in China.
If connectivity can be improved in Asia’s third largest economy, it could become a vast new marketplace for online companies. Amazon has set up an Indian arm to tap India’s e-commerce market, which is set to soar to over $100 billion in the next five years from the current $11 billion, according to Morgan Stanley. MS -1.00 %
Local e-commerce companies such as Flipkart Internet Pvt. and Snapdeal.com, owned by Jasper Infotech Pvt. Ltd., have been getting large-scale financial backing from investors. In October, Japan’s SoftBank Corp. 9984 2.21 % invested more than $600 million in Snapdeal.
India’s shortcomings in building traditional infrastructure mean it doesn’t have the roads, bridges, power lines and predictable electricity supply that would make it easier to connect the country.
Getting access to land through India’s myriad local and federal government bodies that control access to rights of way has also checked momentum.
Work on the network has so far only begun in 19% of the village clusters, and of those, 15% have faced delays getting access to the land because of red tape, according to the committee’s report.
A shortage of duct through which to feed the fiber has also held progress back, as have problems with the government-developed technology to connect the cables to the schools, community centers and hospitals they are meant to serve with the Internet.
“It is a monumental project but it really can be a game changer for India,” said Ms. Sundararajan. “We’re going from dial-up to actual broadband pace.”
Write to Joanna Sugden at joanna.sugden@wsj.com
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