Srinagar, August 02, 2020 (PPI-OT): In occupied Kashmir, the people have been facing severe difficulties due to the non-availability of high-speed internet for the last about one year. When the Modi-led fascist Indian government repealed Kashmir’s special status and divided it into two union territories on August 5, last year, it enforced an unprecedented communications blackout.
Presently, Kashmir is also under siege to contain the spread of the coronavirus and residents of the Valley have to stay home, doctors must treat them online but this is no easy task in Kashmir, which has had no 4G internet for close to a year and where broadband connections are thin on the ground.
“We should focus on staying indoors and not come out,” explained a senior doctor at Srinagar’s Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital. “In such a situation, online consultations with doctors become important because we don’t want non-Covid patients to throng hospitals.”
The low-speed internet makes it difficult for a patient to send his test and other diagnostic reports to the doctor. “I can barely see a patient’s face on a video call due to low speed,” said the doctor. Meanwhile, a year of no 4G has had a far-reaching impact on life in Kashmir. It has crippled health and education. It has also heightened the economic strain, choking off business and web-based services.
With 4G internet, it took Omar Yusuf four to five minutes to submit a customer’s form online. “4G is like a dream now,” sighed 25-year-old Yusuf, who runs two khidmat centres in Budgam district. “During 4G internet days, we would submit around 50 forms daily but on 2G, we barely manage to submit five or six forms. It takes between half an hour and an hour to upload a single form,” he added.
Forced to rely on 2G, Yusuf is reluctant to entertain customers. “When there was complete internet shutdown from August to January, I suffered an estimated loss of Rs 2.5 lakh but with 2G, the loss is continuous,” he said. Some entrepreneurs in the Valley have given up on fledgling businesses already. When 24-year-old Alam Gul started a software solution company in 2018, he had invested all his savings, earned from a job in New Delhi.
“It was a joint venture with my partner,” said Alam Gul, a web developer. “We were doing fine and had started getting clients from outside India as well. Then the August 5 shutdown happened and we went bankrupt. Now, we are back to zero.”
His venture failed to deliver services promised to clients. “No internet meant no work,” he said. “We couldn’t afford the cost of office rent so we had to shut down. We were even forced to sell the laptops we had bought for work,” he deplored.
Every now and then, 25-year-old Bazila Ehsan puts a number of books and articles on auto-download at night. “The idea is to use the night time to download the study material so that I can read it during the day,” said Ehsan, a PhD scholar at the Central University of Kashmir. “But then, if you have questions or want additional reading material, it takes a lot of time on 2G and you lose patience.”
Ehsan is among thousands of students and scholars struggling in Kashmir. Two months earlier, she had applied for a broadband connection but it had not been installed yet. After she enrolled at the university last November, Ehsan spent Rs 30,000 to make a trip to Delhi – just to access the internet. “I downloaded whatever relevant material I could find, bought books because markets were closed in Kashmir, photocopied articles,” she said.
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