AirJaldi Networks — Solar-Powered Wireless Broadband for India's Unconnected Villages

AirJaldi began as a wireless pilot serving the Tibetan exile community in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, in 2005, formally launched as AirJaldi Networks in 2007 and incorporated as Rural Broadband Pvt. Ltd. in 2009.
It now operates 40 wireless and fibre networks spanning roughly 80,000 km² across nine Indian states — Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Sikkim, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka — serving about 200,000 registered users including schools, clinics and households, according to the organisation's own published profile.
Microsoft's Asia news team independently documented the network keeping the Government Tribal Boys' Hostel in Paratwada online during a national COVID-19 lockdown, and separately reported an estimate of more than 230,000 subscribers across roughly 1,500 villages at the time of its feature — a scale of operation also examined by an academic case study of the Dharamshala deployment.
To cope with frequent power cuts, network operation centres and relays run on solar power with battery backup. AirJaldi blends its social mission with commercial subscription revenue to sustain operations, and has partnered over the years with Google (2010), Facebook's Express Wi-Fi (2014) and Microsoft, and ran a USAID-backed 'Productive Paths' digital-inclusion programme from 2021.
Published figures come primarily from AirJaldi's own reporting and partner case studies rather than an independent third-party audit, and, like most rural ISPs, the network still depends on backhaul from urban hubs and remains exposed to the same monsoon and terrain disruptions that motivated its founding.

Read the full analysis: https://airjaldi.com/Profile