India Government said BharatNet has completed Phase-1 of the broadband project by connecting over 100,000 Gram Panchayats (GP) across the country.
BharatNet network built under Phase 1 is designed to offer broadband services in over 2.5 lakh villages for more than 200 million rural Indians.
Announcing this development, Union Minister for Communications Manoj Sinha has underlined the need to complete the second phase of the BharatNet broadband project before the target of March, 2019 by connecting 250,000 Gram Panchayats with broadband network.
India’s telecom minister asked the officials to include and enforce the clause of financial incentive for speedy execution of Phase-2 of the project.
Phase 1 achievements
31 May 2014
work started in 4,918 GPs, laid 358 km OFC, services in 59 GPs
30 June 2016
work started in 84,834 GPs, laid 124,817 km OFC in 53,557 GPs, services in 7,229 GPs
31 Dec 2017
Laid 2,54,895 km OFC in 109,926 GPs, services in 101,370 GPs
Awards
UP (East), Maharashtra, MP, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Jharkhand the Best performing States
Kerala, Karnataka and Haryana covered all the GPs under the project
Karnataka for Best Utilisation of BharatNet
BSNL and CSC e-Governance Services India best performing implementation partners
Tejas Networks and ITI best performing equipment supply partners
Finolex Cables, Sterlite Technologies and Vindhya Telelinks best performing optical fibre cable supply partners
CDOT and NIC best technology partners
Individual contributors’ award
Mahmood Ahmed, JAF of USOF
Rupendra Kumar, director(BB), USOF
Deepika Khosla, CGM, BBNL
Deepak Chanduka, CGM, BBNL
Shahnawaz Alam, CGM, BBNL
Anil Kumar Gupta, CGM, BBNL
Vinod Kumar, CGM, BBNL
PK Panda, GM, BBNL
BP Meena, GM, BBNL
Aruna Sundararajan, secretary, Department of Telecom, said that the project achieved a record of laying of 800 kilometres of optical fibre per day. The tariff for BharatNet was revised to attract more telecom service providers (TSPs) to use the infrastructure to provide high-speed broadband services in the rural areas through Wi-Fi, FTTH.
