At a town hall meeting in Facebook&’s Californian headquarters last September, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rhapsodised about the role of technology and social media in nation-building. He spoke about wanting to more than double India&’s GDP and the innovation and job creation necessary to achieve this: “We need both highways and i-ways in India. I want to connect all 6 lakh villages in India via fibre optic cables.”

And for a moment, just then, it looked like Facebook was going to be the star of India&’s digital future.

For Facebook&’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg had founded Internet.org, a philanthropic project to bring the internet to the rural and impoverished. Part of this was Free Basics, a service that offers smartphone users free access to basic internet services, delivering health, news and weather services run by Facebook&’s partners – as well as a watered-down, text-only version of Facebook, of course – bringing millions of Indians who are currently unconnected online.

This week, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) ruled that Free Basics (and other services like it) should be banned. The decision came after months of campaigning by Indian internet activists who argued that Free Basics infringes on the principle of net neutrality: by subsidizing some content, Facebook would create incentives for customers to use certain services/websites only to avoid eating into their data. The practice would create an unfair marketplace, making it harder for smaller players to compete and quashing innovation. Depending on their stance before TRAI&’s decision, social media either lauded or derided it. In the latter group was Facebook board member and Silicon Valley highflier Mark Andreessen, who put his foot in his mouth with this comment on Twitter: “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”

The tweet has since been deleted, but Andreessen opened himself up to a world of criticism from Indian Twitter and Facebook users by implying that Free Basics, like colonialism, would have helped the Indian economy and that banning it was an economic error. 

The backlash is unsurprising – India continues to have a rather strong anticolonial identity – but it may be worth, for a minute, examining the narrative behind Andreessen&’s claim for an explanation about why Free Basics, which looks perfect on paper, failed. 

Zuckerberg has long been pitching Free Basics as a humanitarian effort. In another town hall, this one held at IIT Delhi, Zuckerberg said, “The biggest reason why four billion people don’t access the Internet – bigger than issues of access or cost – is they don’t know why it might be valuable.”

In an article for The Times of India, he wrote about Ganesh, a farmer, who subscribed to Free Basics, found weather information and commodity prices, and is now investing in new crops that will, hopefully, raise his standard of living. Ganesh&’s story follows a widely-accepted narrative: technology creates opportunities, information is empowering, the internet can lead to widespread economic development. This sounds right, but does it hold up to analysis?

Last year, Kentaro Toyama, a self-proclaimed “recovering technoholic”, wrote Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Toyama worked for Microsoft Research in India, hoping to apply his technical skills to helping one of the world&’s poorest and fastest developing communities. Instead Toyama found that technology solved very little. Free computer classes for girls were ignored by slum societies where the teenagers could instead earn money for their families by working afternoons, mass SMS campaigns spreading health awareness were deleted as spam even by the rural poor, and schools with PCs and internet access struggled to find a way to include them in the curriculum. Easy internet access didn’t help.

In his own farmer-exposed-to-technology story, Toyama talked about Digital Green, a social enterprise that uses how-to videos featuring local farmers as a teaching aid to instruct other farmers on better agricultural practice. The project was a great success, and has been adopted by the Indian Ministry of Rural Development, because it turns out farmers prefer advice from faces they recognise than the vast, anonymous internet at their fingertips.

Toyama concluded: “[T]echnologies don’t have additive effects. They magnify existing social forces, which themselves can be good, bad or neutral.”

What does that mean in the context of TRAI&’s decision and Mr Andreessen&’s little outburst? Data shows that there is obviously an appetite for digital access in India. By December 2015, India was predicted to have the world&’s second-largest Internet user base (surpassed only by China). A  by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International claimed that 402 million Indians would have used the internet by the end of the year. In Urban India, the mobile Internet user base grew by 65 per cent over last year to reach 197 million in October 2015. In rural India, the mobile Internet user base is expected to reach 87 million by December 2015 and 109 million by June 2016.

But while Facebook&’s estimation of appetite was on the spot, it was its “humanitarian” efforts that missed the mark. Simply put, the internet is coming to India, and with Google&’s partnership with the Indian Railways to install Wi-Fi hotspots in railway stations (100 of which are set to go live this year), India will access an unlimited internet on which it can build solutions that are contextually appropriate. If the internet is empowering, it&’s because it allows individuals to use it in ways they find most helpful, not in ways large corporations might recommend. And if India is to fully embrace Modi&’s digital plans, it needs digital solutions that are specific, human-focused and harmonious with local social beliefs and trends. With its limited purview, Free Basics was always going to fail.

The writer is a London-based journalist.