Building the nation's long-term digital spine

India needs a future-proof fibre backbone to deliver reliable, scalable, and mission-critical connectivity for a Viksit Bharat through 2047 and beyond.

- BY DR JAIJIT BHATTACHARYA

The government in India is in overdrive to ensure that the country attains developed nation status by 2047.

This 22-year journey demands strong, future-proof connectivity that extends well beyond the target year. Achieving the vision of Viksit Bharat will require, among other critical factors, networks that can endure the next two decades and more, without needing replacement due to poor-quality fibre, scalability constraints, reliability issues, or technological obsolescence.

India must therefore prioritise not only what works today, but what will continue to serve a developed nation for decades. Our connectivity infrastructure must be built to meet the country's population-scale requirements for capacity, performance, scalability, reliability, and longevity.

INDIA'S EXISTING CONNECTIVITY PATHWAYS

In today's world, there are three principal pathways to achieving population-scale digital connectivity: wireless networks, satellite systems, and optical fibre. Wireless connectivity refers largely to the last-mile networks that people encounter daily through 3G, 4G, and 5G technologies. These networks enable mobile usage, broadband access, and enterprise communications, and they evolve rapidly as new standards emerge, with 6G now on the horizon.

The pace of these generational shifts means that operators must invest repeatedly, every five to seven years, to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate new capa-bilities. Wireless systems also extend to longhaul technologies such as WiMAX and point-to-point radio links, but these too remain bound by the inherent limits of available spectrum and physical constraints.