The setting up of 1 crore public Wi-Fi hotspots across the country by this year as proposed under the present telecom policy has the potential to create 2-3 crore job opportunities, a senior government official said on Saturday.

“Given by conservative estimate of each hotspot enabling 2-3 direct and indirect employment opportunities, the creation of 10 million hotspots under the NDCP (National Digital Communications Policy) target by 2022 would potentially generate 20-30 million job opportunities in the small and medium scale sectors,” telecom secretary K. Rajaraman said.

Speaking at the Broadband India Forum (BIF) event, he called upon Wi-Fi equipment makers to lower the cost of their products for the expansion of the Prime Minister’s Wi-Fi Access Network Interface (PM-WANI) scheme which aims to set up wifi hotspots across the country.

Public Wi-Fi hotspots have immense potential to act as catalysts for rural economy and as a means of rural livelihood besides propelling socio-economic growth by providing employment opportunities for millions of small local and village entrepreneurs.

“Sprawling manufacturing units will be needed to produce millions of access points for PM WANI which is the core of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Mission and would lead to therefore more job creation," Rajaraman said.

\According to the PM-WANI portal, over 56,000 wifi hotspots have been deployed across the country till date. Rajaraman said that he wants more entrepreneurs to join PM-WANI programme facilitated by C-DoT.

"We also want local communities to join PM-WANI scheme wholeheartedly. We will be happy to facilitate existing entrepreneurs in local neighborhoods especially local cable operators, internet service providers, tourism operators etc to come forward and help proliferate WANI access points across the country," he said.

BIF announced the launch of BIF Connectivity Accelerator Programme in partnership with Meta (formerly Facebook) to enable entrepreneurs and startups build innovative connectivity solutions and support the public wifi ecosystem.

"This (BIF Connectivity Accelerator) virtual programme will give startups the opportunity to partner with BIF to help develop relevant use cases and help scale their businesses. We appeal to all stakeholders to come together and join hands with us to expeditiously and effectively implement this national mission," BIF president TV Ramachandran said.