Crawling through Bangalore’s gridlocked roads, nearly 600,000 IT workers fret through the approximately 2.5 hours it takes to commute between their homes and offices every day. Some curse, some honk, some yell. But no fact speaks as loud as the $90 billion (Rs 3,60,000 crore) the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) says India loses every year because it lacks the broadband network that could, for example, allow millions of people to sidestep clogged roads and work out of home.

CII’s figure is startling, because it measures the full cost of a nation struggling with no or slow broadband. “With slow broadband penetration, India’s competitiveness is slipping,” Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-based telecom consulting firm BDA Connect, told BW recently in Delhi. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked India 54 out of 69 countries in its 2007 E-Readiness rankings. In connectivity and technology infrastructure, India, at 57, was last among the BRIC nations.

Usually, when people bemoan the sorry state of India’s infrastructure, they complain about the inefficiencies that spring from the lack of decent roads, airports, etc., and talk of long-term projects to build these as the solution. The idea of creating a national ‘information superhighway’ — just as the US and China have — to act as a virtual solution to address the shortage of physical infrastructure is not discussed as much.