As the founding Chairman and MD, Pinkesh, is the driving force behind Ishan Technologies, one of India’s leading IT and telecom services providers. Under his guidance, Ishan Technologies has expanded exponentially over the past two decades, from its modest beginnings in a tier III city in Gujarat to a company with a presence in 100+ cities across India and with over 1700 employees. An accomplished business leader with over 25 years of overall experience in the tech sector under his belt; he brings a wealth of industry knowledge and experience, combined with a passion for innovation and a strong commitment to social responsibility.
The author examines how the digital divide threatens India’s AI ambitions and calls for urgent action in fiberisation, last-mile connectivity, and inclusive infrastructure to ensure no region is left behind
India’s ambition to become a global artificial Intelligence (AI) powerhouse is not short on vision or investment. As per PwC, AI is expected to contribute nearly $967 billionto India’s GDP by 2035, transforming industries, catalysing innovation, and defining economic productivity. Yet, this ambitious vision hinges on more than just algorithms and data, it depends on the digital infrastructure that underpins AI. Without closing the glaring gaps in India’s network capabilities, this dream risks becoming a privilege of a few, rather than a growth engine for all.
So, what’s slowing us down?
The Infrastructure Gap
For AI to function at scale, be it in autonomous logistics, real-time smart city insights, or rural health diagnostics, it needs fast, reliable, and low-latency networks. But India’s current digital backbone is unevenly developed. Urban centres have access to robust 5G networks, but large parts of rural and semi-urban India continue to rely on patchy 4G or worse, creating an AI readiness gap that mirrors the existing digital divide.
This divide limits access to critical services. In sectors like telemedicine or AI-powered educational platforms, latency and bandwidth are non-negotiable. If a doctor in Delhi can diagnose remotely in real time, but a patient in a remote village can’t connect due to poor network coverage, the system fails the very people who stand to benefit the most.
Why AI Needs High-Speed Connectivity
AI applications are fundamentally data-intensive. From training large models to deploying them in real-world scenarios, they require:
- Low-latency, high-bandwidth networks: Modern AI applications aren’t just running in distant cloud servers, they are increasingly embedded in our immediate environment, requiring instantaneous responses. Consider autonomous logistics systems that could transform India’s complex supply chains. These systems need to process sensor data and make routing decisions in milliseconds and not minutes.
Similarly, remote healthcare diagnostics, potentially revolutionary in addressing India’s rural healthcare crisis, depend on the seamless transmission of high-resolution medical images and video streams between distant locations. A split-second delay could mean the difference between accurate diagnosis and missed symptoms. Thereby, highlighting why low-latency, high-bandwidth connections are essential requirements for critical AI applications.
- Edge computing and distributed data centres:The future of AI deployment lies not in distribution. Edge computing, processing data closer to where it’s generated rather than sending everything to centralized data centres, is becoming essential for efficient AI operations.
India’s vast geography and diverse user base make this approach particularly relevant. By distributing computing resources strategically across regions, AI systems can deliver faster inference, reduce bandwidth consumption, and maintain functionality even during network disruptions.
However, this distributed infrastructure model demands comprehensive network coverage connecting these edge nodes to both users and central systems.
- Stable, high-speed connectivity: AI systems aren’t static, they improve through continuous learning and adaptation. This ongoing training and updating process requires stable, reliable connectivity between data sources, training facilities, and deployment environments.
In India’s context, where weather conditions, power fluctuations, and other factors can interrupt connectivity, ensuring this stability presents a significant challenge. Intermittent connections don’t just inconvenience users; they fundamentally compromise the learning capabilities and operational reliability of AI systems.
Overall, without these foundational enablers, India risks building an urban-centric AI economy, where Tier 1 cities advance rapidly, while rural India is left grappling with connectivity blackouts and bandwidth bottlenecks.
The Role of ICT Providers
India’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) providers are leading this infrastructural transformation. Their role is not just to expand coverage but to reimagine digital architecture. through rural fiberization, satellite internet rollouts, and support for local edge data centres. Their investments in building robust, future-proof networks is determining how equitably AI’s benefits are distributed across the country.
But this effort also demands collaboration across government, industry, and regulatory bodies. Incentivizing private players to invest in under-served geographies, easing rights-of-way for fibre deployment, and integrating AI-readiness benchmarks into Smart City and Digital India missions could accelerate infrastructure growth.
AI for All, Not for a Few
If India’s AI dream is to become an inclusive reality, digital infrastructure must be treated as a national imperative, on par with roads, electricity, and water. The risks of inaction is too far because in this intelligence era, connectivity is about participation in the next phase of human innovation. It’s a prerequisite for economic opportunity, quality education, advanced healthcare, and full citizenship in the digital age.A fragmented network will entrench the very inequalities AI seeks to resolve.
Ultimately, AI’s power lies in its ability to democratize opportunities. But that promise can only be fulfilled if every citizen, regardless of their address, has equal access to the networks that power intelligence.
India’s digital future needs faster, wider, and more resilient networks. And the time to build them is ‘now’.
