Govt to start Rs 34,000 crore BharatNet project from Monday, aims broadband for all panchayats by May 2019

The government will tomorrow start its second and final phase of BharatNet project — with an outlay of around Rs 34,000 crore — to provide high-speed broadband in all panchayats by March 2019, Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said on Sunday.

Under the project, the government aims to connect 1.5 lakh panchayats through 10 lakh kilometres of additional optical fibre and give bandwidth to telecom players at nearly 75 per cent cheaper price for broadband and wifi services in rural areas. “We will tomorrow launch phase 2 of BharatNet to connect 1.5 lakh gram panchayats with high-speed broadband by March 2019. Phase 1 of the project, under which 1 lakh GPs were to be connected, will be completed by the end of this year. We expect telecom operators to provide at least 2 megabit per second speed to rural households,” Sundararajan said.

Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha, Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar will launch the project on Monday. The telecom ministry will sign agreements with seven states — Maharashtra, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand — which will roll out the project on their own with partial funding from the central …read more