All Aboard India's Technicolour Dream Train Click - Short Edition

Driving in India is an experience.

The roads are crammed and the horn is omnipresent and the rules are...

Well, they're there somewhere, I'm sure.

And that's why we will not be doing a story about self driving cars

in India any time soon.

And despite the fact that it seems like everybody here owns a car,

that's not true.

Many people choose to travel by train instead.

But if you think that is any less intense...

Think again.

Yeah, about those rules...

Mumbai Central Station is a massive, heaving hub connecting the city

to the north and east of India.

But if you look closely, you will see something else

connecting the commuters to the rest of the world.

116 wireless access points provide free Wi-Fi to anybody

with an Indian phone number.

It is provided by Google which says that about 2.5 TB

are being downloaded here every day.

And here is the interesting part, this is not just about this station.

Along India's railway tracks lie 45,000 kilometres of optical fibre

and Google is piping Internet access down those cables to feed Wi-Fi

access to 114 other train stations as well.

The man overseeing the project is Gulzar Azad, who I caught up

with while he was waiting for a train.

If you had to take one place in the country where you wanted

tremendous fibre and you had to have reliable power,

relatively speaking, power is a challenge

across the country, and you had to have the entire country walking

through it there is only one place, that is a railway station.

Can you guarantee that all services on Google's Wi-Fi

will be treated equally?

Absolutely.

I think the whole motivation for us, if you look at the reason why we did

this was to see if we could provide an open Internet, completely open

with access to the entire web.

The way the web was designed.

So, there is a fibre optic network rolling out from train stations

like this to the vast rural areas of this enormous country.

And David hopped on a train to find out what effect that's having

elsewhere in India.

It is hard not to be romantic about the railways of India.

British colonial rulers laid track for control,

shifting resources - mostly out - and prising open markets.

Now it is about moving people, millions a day.

And thanks to optic fibre, data.

I took the train to Jaipur station to investigate.

It has proper broadband and it is free.

People are filling their booths.

Apart from some controversy, at another station where commuters

were using free Wi-Fi to download hard-core pornography,

the provision of high-speed Wi-Fi has been almost universally praised.

90,000 people pass through Jaipur station every day.

I use the Internet for news and entertainment.

Mainly for office work.

For this student journalist it means she can keep tabs

on breaking stories.

Early in the morning, the world changes like...

So many things change.

I have to come and check.

Indian stations are full of thriving businesses,

feeding off or simply feeding the thousands streaming

through them every day.

Free Wi-Fi has been a boon to local businesses here.

Ashok runs a tea stall on the platform.

He makes more money now that his customers can make online

payments to him.

I use the Wi-Fi when my 4G signal does not catch.

When that does not work, I use Wi-Fi, especially

when a customer pays digitally.

I need it to confirm I have received the payment.

Digital payments are worth about 30%-50% of my takings.

This is music to the years of people managing the railways of India.

A nationalised industry that runs at a loss.

They think that high-speed Wi-Fi could be a good pull

for a station like Jaipur.

They plan to build a huge concourse and attract retail

and services business.

It might just be an earner.

As Wi-Fi expands and it becomes taken for granted then I think

people will transfer more and more of their business.

Jaipur is a domestic and international tourist hub

of high repute.

People come out here from all parts of the world.

And when you have a huge concourse it becomes an area where you can

have shops and entertainment spots.

For Google, more people online is more people to sell to.

India's railway is the country's backbone.

Its public Wi-Fi is poised to be at least as far reaching.

This is the Andumen Irdu Primary School in Calcutta.

There are 155 kids here from Grade 1 through to 7,

and a whole bunch of dedicated teachers.

And this is how they start their day.

Over in Virjaya Nijak's classroom, things are

a little more serious...

So, at the back of the projector, there's a device which is plugged

in and is running videos on English, maths and science.

The videos are made for the entire region.

But then they're dubbed in different dialects,

different languages, depending on where they're sent to.

Today, we're learning about fractions.

It is great teaching tool - as long as there is electricity...

But there are plenty of times when there isn't.

This is a village school.

Earlier, it would be difficult to teach because of power cuts.

As the day passed by in the afternoon, we would have power

cuts for more than two hours.

That's why the projector and tablet are hooked up to this box,

which is itself attached to a solar panel on the roof.

Together, they can provide up to five hours of electricity a day,

meaning that classes don't have to be interrupted or cancelled

if the power cuts out.

Then, we started using solar power, as it is an easy and natural source

of generating electricity.

We have introduced a study of generating power through solar

energy to our students, and are teaching them the importance

and working of it.

We also explain to our students that this process will help us

in the future to generate electricity.

This whole system has been provided by the Selco Foundation,

an Indian charity with the aim of hoping to alleviate poverty

by improving access to energy.

With this, they will get a better education through audiovisual

teaching, and there is no problem of electricity.

So any time teachers can take their students

to the classroom, they can teach through this medium.

Selco and other NGOs they work with pay for half of the cost

of installing the projector and solar system -

the other half comes from local schools or local governments.

How important is the projector?

TRANSLATION: Before this project came in to use it,

we had very few students.

But since, we have started using the solar power,

our number of students has increased in a good way.

We have students coming to us from different villages to learn,

and not only students - we have other schools coming down

to our institute for smart classes.

The smart class is a good way of teaching kids these days.

They seem to enjoy and learn more than usual.

After we introduced smart class, our school stands proudly

in the educational sector.

We plan to grow larger as the years pass by.

Cool.

Whoa!

The same system is already in hundreds of rural schools,

and they're aiming to add hundreds more this year.

And it's not just key for schools - across rural India, businesses can

be helped massively by having a reliable power supply.

Somana is a seamstress who lives a short drive from Kindapur.

She became the breadwinner for her family after her father

was taken ill.

The more clothing she can prepare, the more she gets paid.

With her old method, she could fix a couple

of items per day.

But thanks to the solar panel on her roof, she can whiz

through five or six per day.

Plus, she has a fan, a TV and a light, so she can work

earlier and later.

One-quarter of India's rural population lives below the official

poverty line - that's 260 million people whose livelihoods could be

improved by the addition of basic facilities like electricity.

And of course, one key way of helping people out

of poverty is...

..education.

It's always such a privilege to come to a place like this and see how

the simplest technology can make a world of difference.

That's it from India for the moment.

You can see plenty of photos and more backstage

gossip on Twitter.

Thanks for watching.

See you soon.