Meeting Modi's 1,000-day challenge to have optical fibre cable in villages

Telecom department will have to rope in private companies to achieve the target announced on Independence Day.

The target set by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech to connect every village in the country with optical fibre cable (OFC) in 1,000 days is quite possible. But to achieve it, the cables would have to be laid at nearly 3.6 times the current speed: up from the existing average of 350 km a day to over 1,251 km a day.

It is a challenging jump and that is where the weakness of BharatNet as a pure play government programme could show up. BharatNet is the name of the umbrella project under which the government aims to