Google hopes its Project Loon initiative will cover 300,000 Indian villages in 2016. It will need some help from the government–at least not getting in the way–to do so.
Though some government agencies have issues with Google’s Project Loon, Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s minister for telecom and IT said that the government was in principle agreeable to pilots of Google’s Project Loon.
Prasad also said he had also proposed a partnership with state run BSNL for Project Loon, which proposes a fleet of steerable balloons as a backhaul mechanism for mobile networks using the Long Term Evolution 4G protocol.
A few ministries–defense, home and civil aviation and the Department of Telecommunications have raised technical and security concerns over the project.
One of the primary concerns with the proposal is that the spectrum band required for the transmission a band between 700 to 900 MHz is occupied by telecom service providers and is currently unavailable. But security is another concern.
Prasad said the government would help Google in obtaining clearances from civil aviation and the defense ministries.