Five thousand villages across the country will get wireless Internet access by 15 August, a top government official working on the project notified media.
Panchayat-level common service centres (CSCs), which come under the IT ministry will help roll out Wi-Fi Internet in rural and remote areas, Dinesh Tyagi, chief executive officer, CSC e-governance services in the ministry of electronics and information technology said. The IT ministry is working with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) towards this.
The CSCs will act as facilitators to get broadband to villages from the optic fibre network laid down as part of the Bharat Net Project.
Bharat Net project is being implemented by DoT to create network infrastructure for providing 100 Mbps broadband to all gram panchayats (approximately 250,000) in the country in a phased manner by the end of 2018.
In its first phase, 100,000 gram panchayats have been connected by laying underground optical fibre cable and it was implemented through three central public sector undertakings – Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, RailTel Corp. of India Ltd and PowerGrid Corp of India Ltd. After several delays, it was completed recently.
In May, the IT ministry had instructed the DoT to link all CSCs under Bharat Net. CSCs are set up in remote rural villages and help distribute e-governance schemes and other government linked digital schemes to citizens.
There are around 250,000 CSCs across the country, according to Tyagi. The Union budget 2017-18 allocated Rs10,000 crore towards Bharat Net to expedite the project.
By Baishakhi Dutta
