PM-WANI Framework: Assessing Public Wi-Fi Expansion and the Digital Divide in India (2020-2026)

Policy Update
Ayan Bordoloi

Background

The divide between the rural and urban areas has long been the divide in India. According to the National Sample Survey Office data, only about 24 per cent of rural households have internet access, as against about 66 per cent in urban households, while the figures released by the TRAI indicates that the broadband penetration rate in urban areas is approximately 93 per cent and in the rural areas it is about 29.3 per cent.

In this context, in July 2016, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) issued a Consultation Paper on “Proliferation of Broadband through Public Wi-Fi Networks” to explore the possibility of a decentralised and low-cost broadband through public Wi-Fi in places where fixed-line and mobile broadband services have failed to reach the last-mile. Its recommendations, which came out in March 2017, envisioned an unbundled architecture that can be accessed through apps, even as pre-mobile days Public Call Office (PCO), enabling small shopkeepers and micro entrepreneurs to act as internet providers without having to get a formal telecom license.

The initiative was started in Bengaluru in 2017, but languished for almost three years due to opposition from telecom companies. The framework was finally approved by the Union Cabinet as PM-WANI (Wi-Fi Access Network Interface) by the PM on 9 December 2020, making it one of the pillars of the National Digital Communications Policy (NDCP), 2018, which has ambitious targets: 50 lakh public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2020 and 1 crore (10 million) by end of December 2022.

To get the jump on Public Data Offices (PDOs) — essentially any shop, kiosk, or establishment — to be able to provide Wi-Fi service without a licence, registration, or entry fee, in the hopes that the proliferation that was seen with PCOs is repeatable with Wi-Fi.

Functioning

The PM-WANI ecosystem is based on four institutional elements. Public Data Offices (PDOs) are set up and managed by the physical hotspot(s) and provide connectivity to end-users. Public Data Office Aggregators (PDOAs) augment multiple PDOs onto a shared backhaul, and offer authorisation and accounting services. App Providers are the companies that create the apps that users use to find and log on to nearby hotspots. A Central Registry, maintained by the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), records the details of all PDOs, PDOAs and App Providers. There is no licence registration fee required for a PDO; only for PDOAs and App Providers to register with the Central Registry.

Since 2024, two changes in the regulation have changed the framework. On 16 September 2024, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) released an updated set of guidelines for PM-WANI that allows for the use of any FTTH (fiber to the home) broadband connection, rather than the more expensive commercial leased line, for PDOs; eliminated the need for a separate “commercial agreement” with the telecom service providers; and enabled PDOs to have up to 100 access points on a single backhaul connection.

Later, on 16 June 2025, TRAI issued its 70th Tariff Order, which limited the price that ISPs could charge PDOs for FTTH packages of up to 200 Mbps to no more than twice the equivalent retail consumer tariff. The framework has also been extended to include existing home and business broadband connections as ‘PM-WANI Hotspots’ and inter-aggregator roaming so that a user with a subscription from one App Provider can connect to the broadband service offered by another App Provider without having to re-register.

Performance

The implementation of PM-WANI has never reached the NDCP’s levels. From roughly one lakh hotspots at the time of Cabinet approval in December 2020, the network grew slowly to 132,508 hotspots by November 2022, before accelerating to 207,642 by July 2024, 246,993 by November 2024, 278,439 by March 2025, 391,599 by 26 November 2025, and 409,403 by 28 February 2026 — alongside 207 registered PDOAs and 113 App Providers. The collection still falls short of the NDCP’s initial goal of one crore hotspots by December 2022, however, and some of the registered hotspots might not be live.

Figure 1: PM-WANI — Cumulative Public Wi-Fi Hotspots Deployed, 2022–2026.

Source: Author’s compilation based on TRAI/DoT data as reported in ThePrint (2024, 2026), Angel One (2025), Manorama Yearbook (2025) and TelecomTalk (2026).

The usage indicators give a more varied picture. As of December 2024, PM-WANI had deployed more than 1.8 million unique users and 58.55 petabytes of data consumption, but average daily data usage per hotspot was down to a few megabytes in 2024 compared with an average of 1 GB per day in 2023, which is much lower than the typical retail broadband data usage, as noted by TRAI — which is another key reason for the regulator’s decision to allow PDOs to make the switch to lower-cost FTTH connections.

The deployment is also geographically uneven, with over half of all hotspots in India being located in Delhi as of November 2025, which is uneasy with the intention of the scheme to target rural areas and underserved areas.

Table 1: State-wise Distribution of PM-WANI Hotspots (as of 26 November 2025). Source: Author’s compilation based on Angel One (2025), citing Annexure-I data released by the Ministry of Communications.

The concentration of people is exacerbated by ground-level attrition. The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), which deploys PM-WANI in a network of Aadhaar centres and Common Service Centres (CSCs) and banking correspondent (BC) outlets, said that it had deployed PM-WANI in more than 350 locations and only 50–70 are remaining as of mid 2026, including around 50 tea gardens in Assam and North Bengal.

Impact

PM-WANI hotspot can offload mobile network congestion and provide relief from increasing data charges for users in urban and semi-urban areas such as students, gig workers and malls, transit centres and dense colonies where commercial users are worried about the threat of a vast public Wi-Fi network.

The scheme’s more profound effect on the digital divide is more controversial, though. On one side is the former chief of the TRAI Ram Sewak Sharma, who suggested that for many low-income families who are struggling with the high demand for data as a result of online education, affordable mobile data of around Rs 7 to 10 per GB is still inadequate, while on the other hand, public Wi-Fi provided in small “sachets”, could still be a viable low-cost alternative — even as the telecom market increasingly narrows down into Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel.

As the side of telecom operators and its industry body, they have said that PM-WANI has become “old news”. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) had pointed out that “public Wi-Fi has lost its relevance” with the increase in broadband subscriptions, which has gone up to 13.5 crore in 2015 to over 100 crore by 2025 and mobile data prices dropping to Rs 7.87 per GB by December 2025. Reliance Jio, on its part, had argued that the PDO model “may have been helpful in the 2G-3G era” but it came “after 4G has already become ubiquitous”.

According to independent analysts, the shortfall is due primarily to the fact that many of the aggregators are charged commercial leased-line tariffs (up to 100 times retail broadband), which are not likely to be recovered from selling Rs 5–10 data packs to end-users. Even though the original vision of WANI was to allow transient or casual users to authenticate only once across different networks, this has been hindered by various mandatory app downloads, OTP verification and lack of seamless roaming (until recently), which have limited the adoption of the service.

Emerging Issues

There are a number of structural issues that have emerged in the period 2020-2026. In April 2026, TRAI released another consultation paper on the future of India’s public Wi-Fi ecosystem, which raised questions about the reliance on the commercial model for providing PDOs and PDOAs “revenue certainty and long-term sustainability,” and the need for an incremental pathway to deployment to be replaced by a structural overhaul of PM-WANI.

Secondly, the business model was financially precarious: While DoT had initially priced a small PDO at Rs 6,000 or Rs 7,000 a year, many aggregators had to charge for commercial-grade leased lines, making it hard to sell low-value data sachets even for micro-entrepreneurs, despite the reforms slated for 2024-2025.

Thirdly, the scheme has not been organised around institutions that have an institutional incentive to maintain connectivity. However, civil-society practitioners believe that PM-WANI would have been better if the panchayats, schools, libraries, health centres, and Common Service Centres were enrolled as PDOs/PDOAs as from the beginning, to provide connectivity and support services that people already needed or wanted, rather than selling connectivity as a product.

Fourth, PM-WANI and BharatNet have been evolving as parallel initiatives, with an estimated cost of approximately Rs 42,000 crore (according to Press Information Bureau) of using fibre in BharatNet’s backbone to Gram Panchayats, which could have significantly reduced the cost of backhauling for PM-WANI in rural areas.

Fifth, geographic concentration undermines the ‘digital divide’ rationale of the scheme: By late 2025, over half of all hotspots were in Delhi and civil-society deployments continued to shrink instead of growing in the areas the scheme was supposed to support, the network’s growth hasn’t matched the geographies it was originally designed for.

Sixth, data quality and transparency issues remain — local shop owners were not aware of or able to access hotspots listed on the PM-WANI central registry, suggesting that while the total number of hotspots may represent a lot of functioning infrastructure, it may not actually be.

Way Forward

India’s public WiFi policy needs to be more targeted, rather than country-wide, and institutionally based. There could be scope for more viable deployments, particularly in places where shopkeeper-led deployments are difficult, as Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) has seen in Assam and North Bengal, where the sites adopted for the purpose are panchayats, schools, libraries, primary health centres and common service centres, which already have a reason to provide services.

By converging the architecture of the fibre backbone of BharatNet and the last mile hotspot architecture of PM-WANI, which may also be leveraged through BBNL and BSNL, it is possible to achieve significant reduction in backhaul cost in rural and hill areas where commercial ISP backhaul is expensive or not available. On the demand side, the use of seamless, standards-based authentication technologies like Passpoint or OpenRoaming, which TRAI is looking into, would minimize the hassle of repeatedly downloading apps and entering OTPs, which has made transit, migrants and travellers hesitate to use the app.

Instead of focusing on further urban saturation, policy focus and any future government funding highlighted in TRAI’s April 2026 consultation could be targeted on geographies where mobile coverage is weak or the availability of backhauls is limited — the Northeast, hill and tribal districts, and high footfall public transport points — rather than what has been achieved in the urban market so far, demonstrated by the hotspot share in Delhi. Lastly, the Central Registry, which is maintained by C-DOT, should be routinely reviewed by an independent auditor to identify and eliminate hotspots that are no longer active or are unreachable, and thus not count in the scheme’s reported coverage.

Selected References and Important Links

Department of Telecommunications / PIB (2020), Cabinet approves PM-WANI scheme for proliferation of public Wi-Fi network, Government of India. Available at: https://www.deccanherald.com/india/cabinet-approves-pm-wani-scheme-for-proliferation-of-public-wi-fi-network-925381.html

Drishti IAS (2024), PM-WANI, Government of India Digital India initiative overview. Available at: https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/pm-wani-3

Drishti IAS (2025), PM-WANI Scheme: Features, Benefits and Wi-Fi Expansion in India. Available at: https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/pm-wani-scheme

ThePrint (2024), Why PM-WANI is falling behind targets & how govt plans to fix the public Wi-Fi hotspots scheme. Available at: https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/why-pm-wani-is-falling-behind-targets-how-govt-plans-to-fix-the-public-wi-fi-hotspots-scheme/2239166/

ThePrint (2026), Does PM-WANI need a reset? India’s public Wi-Fi is everywhere and nowhere. Available at: https://theprint.in/ground-reports/pm-wani-indias-public-wi-fi-deployment-reset-trai/2973160/

MediaNama (2024), DoT eases PM-WANI guidelines for small businesses. Available at: https://www.medianama.com/2024/09/223-dot-amends-pm-wani-guidelines-pdos-wifi-hotspots-without-commercial-license/

Angel One (2025), Wi-Fi Revolution in India: PM-WANI Scheme Network Crosses 3.91 Lakh Wi-Fi Hotspots. Available at: https://www.angelone.in/news/government-schemes/wi-fi-revolution-in-india-pm-wani-scheme-network-crosses-3-91-lakh-wi-fi-hotspots

TelecomTalk (2026), PM-WANI Crosses 4 Lakh Hotspots as Public Wi-Fi Use Surges Across India. Available at: https://telecomtalk.info/government-expands-public-wifi-network-pm-wani/1005923/

Manorama Yearbook (2025), What is PM-WANI scheme? Available at: https://www.manoramayearbook.in/current-affairs/india/2025/06/17/pm-wani-scheme-upsc-explained.html

Rau’s IAS Study Circle (2024), PM-WANI (Prime Minister WIFI Network Interface) scheme. Available at: https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/pm-wani/

Insights on India (2021), The PM-WANI Scheme. Available at: https://www.insightsonindia.com/social-justice/welfare-schemes/schemes-under-ministry-of-communication/the-pm-wani-scheme/

ThePrint (2025), With cap on tariffs, govt makes yet another attempt to revitalise its public WiFi scheme PM-WANI. Available at: https://theprint.in/india/with-cap-on-tariffs-govt-makes-yet-another-attempt-to-revitalise-its-public-wifi-scheme-pm-wani/2448642/

Inc42 (2024), Bridging The Urban-Rural Digital Divide In India (NSSO data). Available at: https://inc42.com/resources/bridging-the-urban-rural-digital-divide-in-india/

arXiv (2021), A Survey on Rural Internet Connectivity in India (TRAI broadband penetration data). Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.10219

TRAI (2026), Consultation Paper on Proliferation of Public Wi-Fi Networks in India. Available at: https://www.trai.gov.in/consultation-paper-proliferation-public-wi-fi-networks-india

About the Contributor

Ayan Bordoloi is an intern with IMPRI, currently pursuing his master’s in political science at the University of Delhi. His research interests lie in federalism, tribal governance, and Northeast India’s political landscape.

Acknowledgements

The author extends sincere gratitude to the IMPRI team for their guidance and support, along with the reviewers Purbaa Jagannnath and Madhuritha D for their valuable feedback and insights.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organization

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