India plans to give free WiFi to more than 1,000 villages

The Indian government is stepping up efforts to provide free WiFi to 1,050 villages across the country under a new pilot project known as Digital Village.

Over the next six months, each village will get its own WiFi hotspot mounted on a special tower to which villagers can connect using their cell phones. Global tech firms and Indian internet providers are racing to grab a piece of the country's unconnected population of more than 900 million people.


Aruna Sundararajan, an official at the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology says ''the program aims to provide basic development services to rural areas using digital technology'. According to the Indian government, the initial phase of the new program costs around $62 million and It will eventually be extended to other parts of the country.