Coverage is not access
A village can sit inside a coverage map and still be offline in every way that matters. That gap is why the Foundation exists.
India crossed a billion connections some years ago. The maps are impressive. The maps are also, in a specific and important sense, misleading.
Three separate things
Being connected requires three things, and coverage is only the first.
There has to be a signal. There has to be a device the person can actually use — which for a school means a working lab, not a padlocked room with six dead machines. And there has to be somebody who knows how to use it, because a government portal is not self-explanatory to a person who has never filled in an online form.
A village can have the first and none of the others, and it will appear on every coverage map as connected.
Why we anchor on public places
We fund connectivity at schools, primary health centres, panchayat offices and libraries rather than at households. One reliable link a whole village can walk to changes more than a hundred patchy private ones, and it can be maintained, which household connections cannot.
It also puts the connection somewhere a Digital Didi can sit and help people use it, which turns out to matter as much as the bandwidth.
The part everyone skips
A connection nobody maintains is dead within a year. We know this because we inherited several.
So every site now comes with a trained local steward on a stipend, a fault-reporting route into a real support desk, and an annual service visit — all budgeted at installation. Ninety-four per cent of our sites are still live at twelve months. Without the maintenance money that figure would be somewhere south of half, and we would still be describing ourselves as having connected 260 sites.
