The government will provide a maximum grant of INR 19,041 crore as Viability Gap Funding (VGF)
July 30, 2021
Bharat Broadband Network (BBNL), on behalf of the Department of Telecommunications, has released a global tender for the development work of BharatNet through a Public-Private Partnership model across 16 states in the country.
The global tender is for the creation, upgradation, operation and maintenance, and utilization of BharatNet. Under this project, the government will provide a maximum grant of INR 19,041 crore as Viability Gap Funding (VGF), the Ministry of Communications said in a statement.
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The project with a 30-year concession period will cover an estimated 3.61 lakh villages (including Gram Panchayats) across these states – Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh.
The scope of work under the BharatNet PPP project includes connecting the remaining unconnected gram panchayats under the BharatNet project (Phase 1 and Phase 2) and all the inhabited villages beyond the GPs; the upgradation of the existing BharatNet Network; and operation and maintenance (O&M) and utilization of the existing as well as the newly deployed network.
The existing BharatNet network across these 16 states will become part of this project. The existing BharatNet was connecting all the GPs by laying OFC (primarily) between Block and GPs. The scope of the program has now been enhanced to connect all the inhabited villages.
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“The idea is to harness the private sector’s capability, capacity, and efficiency for O&M, utilization, and revenue generation to make BharatNet more effective and accessible. This would also serve the objective of BharatNet to have social inclusion, through effective delivery of government schemes and citizen-centric services using broadband, and also to strengthen e-governance, e-education, telemedicine, and e-banking,” the Ministry of Communications said.
