The committee has suggested including urban areas and business users in the coverage

May 29, 2015

A committee on National Optical Fibre Network, a project to roll out broadband network across village panchayats, has estimated over three fold increase in project cost to Rs 72,778 crore from about Rs 20,000 crore approved earlier.

“The committee has estimated the total cost of the project at Rs 72,778 crore,” the report made public by the Telecom Ministry said.

However, the cost can come down by Rs. 6,900 crore if BSNL’s duct infrastructure could be used for the project which should be renamed as BharatNet, the committee said. The committee has suggested including urban areas and business users in the coverage which was earlier limited to about 2.5 lakh village panchayats and use mix of various technologies like satellite, spectrum for connectivity rather than only optical fibre.

The committee members include former IT Secretary J Satyanarayana, Department of Telecom Joint Secretary V Umashankar and USO Fund Administrator Aruna Sudararajan. Besides, it would have Additional Secretary at Department of Electronics and Information Technology Tapan Ray, IT industry body Nasscom’s former leaders Som Mittal and Kiran Karnik and DoT Advisor (Technology) A K Bhargava.

The committee has suggested reduction in broadband speed to be delivered through this network to 20 megabit per second (mbps) at household level from earlier planned speed of 100 mbps across all gram panchayats in the country.

“BharatNet shall be a project of national importance to establish, by 2017, a highly scalable network infrastructure accessible on a non-discriminatory basis, to provide on demand, affordable broadband connectivity of 2 mbps to 20 mbps for all households,” the report said.

The panel expects that the project can be commissioned by December 2017, while the government has given the deadline of December 2016.