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“You cannot run a modern country without a modern Internet”: Eric Schmidt

Submitted by Karthik on 21 March, 2013 - 08:52

Google's chairman, Eric Schmid, noted that India's Internet infrastructure is lagging well behind the rest of the world.

I am worried that India would find the last wave of computing. It is well behind in the web services model that the rest of the world is adopting. It is crucial for India to invest and enable fast fibre internet connectivity within the country, between the country and the other countries, etc. We know from lots of experience that there are many talented Indian software programmers just waiting to use that. My guess would be that having being satisfied with the great success of IT, the Indian government and the leadership has made the same mistake that companies do, they rested on their own laurels. They said "hey, this is really good" without understanding that the technology changed so quickly. The good news is that the people I have met in my visit so far are all committed to change all that within the next year. So, very soon India will get the fibre optic networks in place, the mobile networks in place.

Schmidt also spoke on the political mishandling of the Internet in India.