The state government’s aggressive rush to erect 707 new 4G mobile towers across 24 tribal districts in Odisha is wrapped in the moral cloth of digital inclusion. Touted as a landmark victory under the Centre’s 4G Saturation Project, the project claims to bring the internet to vulnerable indigenous communities. Yet, an examination of the financial mechanics reveals a hilarious, dark paradox: the state uses billions in public taxes and free land to build a captive network for corporate profits, only to undemocratically ban the very internet services the citizens just funded.
The financial setup is an outright comedy of capital exploitation. Telecom conglomerates refuse to spend their own cash in unprofitable terrains, so the state cushions them entirely. The Central government has poured Rs 2,229.35 crore into rural Odisha using the Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN) — a pool filled directly by a mandatory tax levied on the public’s phone bills.
To make the corporate deal sweeter, Odisha has ordered District Collectors to hand over 2,000 square feet of government land completely free of cost per tow
er site, alongside lightning-fast, free regulatory clearances.
The joke sharpens once the infrastructure goes live. While state-owned BSNL builds the towers, private giants like Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel exploit network-sharing laws to co-locate their equipment on this taxpayer-funded real estate. Having pocketed public capital and free state land, these private carriers are actively rewriting the rules of the internet.
Big Telecom is eroding net neutrality by pushing for ‘traffic management’ tolls and revenue-sharing demands, arm-twisting content creators, and building corporate walled gardens. The citizen pays for the road, the corporate giant gets it for free, and then tolls the citizen to drive on it.
The peak of this systemic absurdity arrives at the consumer’s handset. After using tribal welfare to justify this massive redistribution of wealth, the government-corporate nexus turns around and shuts down the digital highway. Under the guise of national security and regulatory control, the state has weaponised arbitrary internet blackouts and enacted heavy-handed bans on essential communication platforms like Telegram.
The paradox is total, stark, and deeply cynical.
The government takes your tax money, grabs public land, hands a risk-free, captive database of rural citizens to corporate monopolies, and then blocks the platforms you want to use. You fund the towers, the corporates pocket the moolah, and you get a heavily policed, corporate-packaged intranet. This is not nation-building; it is a highly sophisticated, multi-layered trap where the public subsidises its own digital cage.
(Views expressed by the columnist are personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policy of the news portal)