The programme was launched in New Delhi in 2015 by Prime Minister Modi in his typical style – a big event and lots of excitement. Many India Inc leaders lauded the initiative and promised to invest their monies. And there was a tonne of marketing around the campaign before and after the event. Voicing their support, thousands of people even changed their profile pictures on Facebook, including the company’s founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg. It was a class act in event management and a case study for governments in how to market schemes to the public.

Today, two years and two months later, scepticism seems to be trumping exuberance.

Digital India was envisaged as a programme which will stand on a digital infrastructure foundation, which the government would then leverage to strengthen governance through technology, deliver services electronically, create a public data architecture available on demand and, at last, promote electronic manufacturing and create jobs in small towns by enabling faster connectivity.

Digital infrastructure, the foundation of the programme, was key to its success. It had three important components – laying the broadband highways, making universal access to mobile connectivity a day-to-day reality with special focus on the North East and areas affected by left-wing extremism, and establishing common service centres in every gram panchayat so that the government’s services come to the people and not the other way around.

Of the three, the most important, the most expensive and one where the government has to do all the heavy-lifting is, of course, the broadband highways, which involves installing physical infrastructure in the form of fibre optic cables. While launching Digital India, Modi had talked about his “dream of a digital India where high-speed digital highways unite the nation”.

An initiative, National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN), was started under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2011. The aim was to connect 250,000 gram panchayat (GP) offices which serve over 640,000 villages. A new public sector enterprise, Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL), was created to finish the project in two years. But by 2015, the programme had achieved only 1 per cent of its targets.

The Modi government rechristened the NOFN initiative as BharatNet and decided to execute it in two phases. Three state-run agencies, namely Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), RailTel and Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL), were entrusted with laying the optical fibre cables (OFC). Over 1 lakh GPs were expected to be completed by March 2016, but this target was only achieved recently – after a year of delay.

NOFN, without a shred of doubt, is the single most important building block of Digital India. Without it, the government’s programme will fail to materialise.

Connecting 2.5 lakh GPs in the country through OFC, providing 100 megabits per second bandwidth at each GP is no mean task. No wonder the UPA could lay only 358km (by June 2014) of cable in three years. In comparison, the NDA government, as of 3 September, has laid 225,475km of cable in 100,768 GPs.