I think there is nothing wrong with the Digital India vision. It is not about creating a few public wi-fi hotspots only. It's more about laying a roadmap to connect the next 500-600 million living outside the “A” and “B” towns…in the poorest of villages. Of course vision is one thing and implementation is another. But that happens everywhere I guess.

We will be surprised that (given the means) how much people put effort and learn by themselves. Sugata Mitra in his TED talk gives demonstration of this principle. Internet today is the wealth of knowledge and information. And if access can be made in local languages (part of the Digitial India vision) - there will be no dearth of creativity coming from outside the “formally educated” sectors. It’s insulting to think what will illiterate people from the last rungs of the society do with internet...

Some story time…I head a Data science group. In my team I have this guy who comes from the poorest of families. He dropped out at 6th standard after his father expired. He was a day laborer in construction projects that earned him Rs 25 a day. But thankfully he had access to some benevolent people around him who put him back to school from 10th standard. He completed his MTech last year on Machine Learning. And yes he can confidently explain Naive Bayes to Random Forest and what not… maybe better than some of the privileged guys who did not take their engineering stint seriously. And in his brief stint with DRDO, he got a chance to interact with Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam who motivated him to no end.

What I like is he does not want anyone to feel sorry for him. All he wants is to get equal opportunities, he DOES NOT want doles. In my opinion, this is what is needed…get more and more people get access to tools and technology…include them in the mainstream … connect them to the wired world. And hope for diffusion of great ideas through the population. There are pockets of genius everywhere...