India has done what no other country has: Made digital payments free, instant, and universal, and leads the world in mobile-data use. Yet, in one adjacent field we remain a laggard. Public Wi-Fi — the cheap, shared, last-mile connectivity that lets a citizen buy a little internet wherever she is — has barely taken root. India has around 4 lakh public hotspots. France, with a population a fraction of ours, has more than 13 million; the world has over 600 million. For a nation that prides itself on its digital public infrastructure, this is a gap worth explaining — and closing.

The idea was born in April 2016, in an email from Nandan Nilekani. Any consumer, he wrote, should be able to walk up to any Wi-Fi hotspot and connect with a single click — “like an Uber for hotspots” — and anyone with a spare connection could sell a little of it to a passer-by. At TRAI, we built exactly that: An open, interoperable architecture with no central gatekeeper, in which anyone could set up or aggregate a hotspot, and a single app would discover the nearest one, verify the user, take his few rupees through any wallet, and connect him seamlessly across every provider.

We called the retail outlet a Public Data Office, or PDO, and the analogy we kept returning to was the humble PCO — the public call office that put a telephone within walking distance of nearly every Indian by turning a shopkeeper into its keeper. The PDO was the PCO reborn for the internet: The corner shop or tea stall selling connectivity by the sachet, a rupee’s worth at........

© Indian Express