The Digital India campaign by the Govt. of India leads many States towards modernized work culture and many departments in our State Nagaland too make use of the technology for the betterment of the public. The National Scholarship Portal launched by the Govt. of India with the intention of ensuring the benefits of various scholarship schemes reaching each and every eligible student in the country is a milestone in this regard. Even though the users faced technical hardships at the beginning, subsequently the portal has incorporated user friendly measures and the exercise has become simple at the later stage. Many premier educational institutions of higher learning in our country has been accepting applications for admissions to various courses through online mode and most of the job recruitments in the public sector are done through online registration processes. The Nagaland Board of School Education has also introduced many online submission facilities for the easy and better management of the education system in our State.
All the above online services expect net connectivity of reasonably good speed and here comes the real issues of Digital Rural Nagaland. Neither the Govt. operator BSNL nor the private operators care for providing quality services to the rural areas for reasons best known to them. I have been serving in Bhandari Sub Division of Wokha District for the past 5 years and I do not remember getting the BSNL Nagaland network for more than 3(three ) days during my entire service period. I had reported the matter to few high ranking officers of BSNL at Dimapur in the year 2012 and later gave up my hope as it appeared that the main objective of BSNL(NE Circle ) is providing better business prospects to the private mobile operators and not proving better connectivity to Rural India.
Of course the private operator Airtel was initially offering satisfactory 2G services and for a short period of time they offered better 3G services as well. The same was with few other operators such as Vodafone. But now a days the mobile services provided by all the private mobile operators have reached the worst stage and the internet services has almost vanished from Bhandari. I am a postpaid subscriber of Airtel and have taken up the matter with the Customer Care Services many times. Once in the year 2016 they deputed few Service Engineers from Dimapur to rectify the issues. But this year their standard reply is that there are some issues with network up-gradation and their engineers are working on it. No one knows how long they will keep on working on it.
The process of submitting online scholarship applications have begun recently and the school authorities of rural areas will now have a tough time to deal with. They cannot simply inform the students to do the submission by themselves as majority of students and parents do not have access to internet services. They are expected to help the students in the submission processes and also required to complete the Online Institution Verification Process. The major problem one encounter with the National Scholarship Portal is that the page will not get loaded in low speed internet connections and at times one has to try repeatedly for hours together for submitting one application form. With the frequent power failures and the worst net connectivity at rural areas the School Heads are left with no option other than camping at towns having better connectivity and complete the online works.
The connectivity issues are complicated and it is very difficult for common men to win over the powerful private operators. They make everyone depend on mobile services and switching over from one operator to another in rural areas has no use at all as all the operators are same in this matter. The only solution seems to me in this regard is the Govt. of India prescribing minimum net connectivity speed for rural areas before granting licenses to the mobile operators and ensuring proper implementation of the regulations.
Nellayappan B, Bhandari
bnellayappan@gmail.com
