Budget 2016: Telecom ministry seeks 250% rise in allocation

To fund its National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project, which seeks to connect 250,000 gram panchayats with fibre-optic lines the year-end, the department of telecommunications (DoT) has sought a 250 per cent increase in the Centres’ Plan outlay in 2016-17 at Rs 18,214 crore.

The outlay is way more than what the department had sought in the previous Budget. For 2015-16, the Plan outlay for the department was about Rs 5,200 crore and the revised estimate stood at nearly Rs 5,795 crore.
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According to the telecom ministry, a chunk of the monies would be used to fund the NOFN project, and to build telecom infrastructure for village common service centres (CSCs) and Network for Spectrum (NFS) project — a dedicated communications network for the defence forces.

“The ministry plans connectivity of up to 100 mbps bandwidth at gram panchayat level. It also hopes to provide non-discriminatory access to network for all telecom service providers for providing services such as e-health, e-education, and e-governance. The total cost of the project is close to Rs 20,000 crore,” said a senior official.

  NFS has an estimated completion time of 36 months. “The whole project has been divided into nine components. Purchase orders for optical fibre cable component was placed by BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) in July 2014. It is in the process of placing orders for other components. The total cost of the project is roughly Rs 13,000 crore,” added the official.

The telecom ministry has been striving to connect the rural India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Digital India’ campaign and has been working on a plan to promote CSCs.

Implemented under the National e-Governance Plan, formulated by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, these centres are to be internet-enabled front-end service delivery points at the village for all types of services, both government and private.

There are around 100,000 CSCs and officials say by end-March, another 90,000 would be set up. Under the Digital India initiative, the government has formulated a plan to set up 150,000 CSCs in gram panchayats, which number around 242,000. The government had earlier said rural post offices would be converted into CSCs.

“We are working on many projects around CSCs. (Many) states, including Gujarat, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh, would have CSCs in each gram panchayat by the end of this financial year. Also, we are working on the plan to rope in e-commerce companies to work with these CSCs, which will help villages get a direct link with online marketplaces, so that they are able to directly sell their products,” said a senior ministry official.