On February 23, Tata Communications and RailTel Corporation of India signed a strategic MoU to advance what both organizations are calling India’s AI-ready digital backbone.
The collaboration combines RailTel’s network of over 63,000 route kilometers of optical fiber, connecting more than 6,000 railway stations, with Tata Communications’ global platforms for cloud, cybersecurity, and AI-enabled infrastructure.
The press releases are confident, and the language is aspirational. The announcement deserves scrutiny on exactly those grounds.
This is a real investment. That matters. India is a country where global capital has historically circled the opportunity without fully committing to the last mile, and a deal that threads RailTel’s public sector reach into a globally connected digital fabric is not a small thing.
Ministries, state governments, banks, and enterprises that depend on RailTel can expect faster connectivity, more resilient systems, and improved data safeguards. Railway Wi-Fi, public broadband, digital governance platforms: these are services that touch daily life in ways that matter to ordinary people. The infrastructure case is sound.
But infrastructure is not transformation. And we think the distinction deserves to be named clearly, because it is the one the press conference will not make.
India is not a uniform country being upgraded in uniform ways. It is a place of deep geographic and economic stratification, where the same governance apparatus that will benefit from this collaboration also serves regions where the pressures on daily survival run in a very different direction than bandwidth speeds.
The communities along many of the corridors this fiber traverses are managing conditions that no cloud platform addresses: erratic power, limited access to essentials, livelihoods that AI-enabled automation is already beginning to disrupt in agriculture, logistics, and small manufacturing. The people in those corridors are not a footnote to the digital transformation story. They are the story.
Sumeet Walia of Tata Communications said that the collaboration is “building the backbone for a secure, smart, and sovereign future” and that “the technology of tomorrow is a reality for every citizen today.”
That is a meaningful commitment if it is taken literally. We would like to see it taken literally.
What we do not see, in this announcement or in the broader Digital India conversation, is sustained public engagement with the adaptation question.
India’s political leadership has been effective at framing the country as an AI investment destination, and that framing is working. Foreign capital is responding. Domestic champions like Tata are mobilizing. But investment attraction and population preparation are different governance tasks, and they require different kinds of leadership attention.
Knowing that fiber is being laid and knowing what that fiber will enable, what it will displace, what skills it will reward, and which ones it will render redundant, those are questions that require a different kind of public communication than a Navaratna PSU signing ceremony provides.
The diaspora watching this announcement from London, Toronto, and Houston has its own complicated relationship with the idea of India as a technology superpower. Many of them left precisely because foundational systems were not reliable enough to build a life on. They send remittances. They maintain connections. They want the story of India’s modernization to be real, not aspirational. This deal is the kind of thing that earns credibility with that audience when it delivers, and loses it decisively when the gap between announcement and ground reality becomes too wide to ignore.
The investment signal here is genuinely positive. A public sector entity with national fiber reach integrating with a global digital platform is a structurally sound partnership, and it reflects the kind of private-public cooperation that India needs more of, not less. We are not skeptical of the deal itself.
We are asking the question that the deal does not answer. Who is preparing the people the backbone is supposed to serve? Connectivity without comprehension is just faster access to disruption. India’s leaders are building the road. The harder work is helping people understand where it goes.
