Tarun Karthick
Port Blair, 10 August 2023
Remember that time when the world was struggling with COVID-19? Well, back on August 10, 2020, something special happened for the people living in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Prime Minister of India inaugurated the Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar Islands Submarine Optical Fibre Cable (CANI) virtually. It was like a light shining in the darkness.
Now, after three years, life on the islands is totally different. People can use digital payments everywhere from the north in Diglipur to the south in Gandhi Nagar on Great Nicobar Island.
Even the southernmost village in India, Shastri Nagar in Great Nicobar Island, is connected with both high speed mobile data and broadband.
Just a short while ago, getting internet on the islands was hard and expensive. It could take months, even years, to get a broadband internet connection.
The internet was slow, cost a lot, and sometimes didn’t even work. Mobile data was almost impossible to find. Young people had to go to specific spots where their phones could catch the internet, just to use social media or play games.
Life was tough for the islanders when it came to the internet. They had to pay much more than the people on the mainland for bad and slow internet service.
To fix this, the Indian Government spent a lot of money, more than 1200 Crores, to lay a special cable under the sea. This cable connected Chennai to Port Blair and the other islands.
Today, the internet is super fast and works really well. Many people on the islands take it for granted, but we should remember how hard life was before CANI came along.
However, there are still places in North and Middle Andaman and Nicobar District where the internet isn’t good. Even though the Government spent a lot of money to connect the islands with the undersea cable, some places still don’t have good internet because the ground networks of telecom operators are not good.
Some islands are still not connected to CANI, so people there have to use slow and not-so-good satellite internet.
The Government has a plan to connect the islands with another cable from Digha in West Bengal to Diglipur in the North and Middle Andaman. This extra cable will make sure that if something goes wrong with CANI, there’s still another way to get internet.
CANI changed life a lot for the people of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It’s a big achievement, and we should all be happy about it.