BENGALURU : Demonetisation is believed to be pushing the boundaries of digitisation, making the economy paperless and dependant on the Internet. But what about the status of the government’s pet project under the Digital India Initiative – The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) or Bharat Net, estimated to cost `70,000 crores approximately.
Data reveals that only 26 per cent Gram Panchayats (GPs) have been laid with optical fibre and only 6 per cent have been GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks) integrated and tested as of December 4, 2016.
Bharat Net was conceived as the world’s largest rural broadband connectivity project, with an aim of connecting 2,50,000 GPs in India with a bandwidth of 100 Mbps, to be completed by December 2016. However, only 64,955 GPs have been laid with optical fibre.
“NOFN is a critical piece of infrastructure without which we just cannot move towards digital India. It’s now on track and will be complementary to policies being rolled out,” said Jaijit Bhattacharya, President, Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research and Partner, KPMG.
Despite more than half the project remaining incomplete, the government has gone ahead with its drive to limit use of cash and promote e-transactions.
“Bharat Net is an important and ambitious project riddled with problems. The government has miscalculated the effectiveness of BSNL to deliver on this project. They have not involved players who would be more competent,” said Mahesh Uppal, a telecom expert who had extensively contributed in the creation of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). There has also not been any effort to find out how last mile access will be delivered.
“After the Panchayat there can be anything between 1-25 km before it reaches end users and most of those who could have been potential partners are not sufficiently engaged. There are many other issues limiting take-off,” he said.