5G Signal, No Signal to the Power Grid

On the Vision

We have 5G coverage in the district. We also have six hours of load shedding. The signal is excellent. You can stream the darkness in 4K.

Digital India is not a lie, exactly. It is a cropping decision. Like how a wedding photographer does not shoot the leaking roof — the composition is everything. The launch events are real. The fiber-optic cables are real. The 5G towers, recently inaugurated by someone in a hard hat who has never used public transport, are real. What is also real, and somehow never makes it into the press kit, is that large parts of this country charge their phones during the three-hour window when electricity shows up, like a relative who comes unannounced and leaves before dinner.

We are not here to tell you Digital India failed. We are here to note that success, as currently defined, involves a very specific camera angle.

On the Ground

The people who write infrastructure whitepapers and the people who live inside the infrastructure are rarely in the same room. The former has a fellowship, a consultant salary, and strong Wi-Fi. The latter has a jugaad inverter, three functioning tube-lights, and a smartphone they bought on EMI because the government's digital literacy scheme told them to. Both are part of Digital India. Only one of them gets quoted in the report.

• "My village got 5G last year. My cousin still drives forty minutes to find a Jio tower that actually connects."
• "The government app works beautifully on the demo phone at the block office. On my phone, it times out. The block office does not have Wi-Fi for visitors."
• "We were told to go paperless. Our ration shop's server has been down since November. The paper never left."

These are not edge cases. An edge case is a bug the engineers will fix next sprint. This is the product.

On the Metrics

India has the cheapest mobile data in the world. India also has one of the worst electricity access situations in the world. Somewhere in that sentence is an economics PhD waiting to happen, and also my aunt, who charges her phone at the temple because it has a generator.

The metrics are not wrong. Cheap data is real. Tower density is real. UPI transaction volume — genuinely staggering, legitimately impressive, one of the few things that works the way the brochure says it does. But metrics are answers to specific questions. They tell you nothing about the questions that were not asked. Nobody in a TRAI press conference has ever been asked: 'Yes, but can she charge it?'

Progress, when reported in aggregate, is the art of averaging out the people who have everything with the people who have nothing, until the number looks reassuring to an investor in Singapore.

On the Gap Nobody Names

There is a word for the space between what a government announces and what a citizen experiences. That word is 'implementation,' and it is India's oldest cold case. We have been investigating it since 1991 and the file keeps getting thicker. The Digital India version of this gap is particularly poetic because it is invisible by design — you cannot photograph an absence of electricity on a coverage map. The map shows the tower. The map does not show the eight hours it was offline last Tuesday.

• "They gave us smart TVs under a government scheme. We watch them two hours a day when the power comes. The rest of the time they're decorative."
• "Our school got digital tablets. The server room has no air conditioning. The tablets died in May."
• "I have Jio 5G. I use it to download the electricity outage notification from MSEDCL."

What We Are Actually Saying

The Cockroach Janta Party does not think India should stop building digital infrastructure. We think India should stop confusing the map for the territory, the announcement for the arrival, the inaugurated tower for the delivered internet. We are a country that is very good at launching things and somewhat worse at landing them. We are excellent at the ceremony and intermittent on the maintenance. We have world-class ambition and colonial-era wiring, often in the same building.

The quotes on this page are not cynicism. They are dispatches from the gap — the space where the press release ends and the actual country begins. That gap has people in it. They have smartphones. They are waiting for the power to come back so they can read your next announcement about how connected they are.

Digital India is real. So is the load-shedding schedule pinned to the door of the panchayat office. Both documents are government-issued. Only one of them is useful.