VISAKHAPATNAM: Chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu said on Saturday that the much-awaited AP State Fibre Grid (APFG) project will be officially inaugurated this month by President Ram Nath Kovind. Naidu revealed that connection would be given to two lakh households for now. He was speaking at the 'Transforming Education Conference for Humanity' (TECH Conference 2017), in Visakhapatnam on Saturday.
Chandrababu said that the project was in advanced stage and after its inaugural, two lakh households will be given connection with 15 mbps Net speed covering around 600 channels, television services, Internet, telephone connection, video conference facility and WiFi at `200. However, Naidu didn't mention the venue for the inauguration. "It would take almost `5,000 crore to provide Internet facility to all households. But the AP government has spent just 8 per cent of the total money, which is just `320 crore by using electricity poles with this project," Naidu said.
APSFL, the ambitious project, was launched in March 2016. However, the official inauguration for the project was delayed by many months.The chief minister, during his inaugural address, also spoke of how the state had been using technology for education via virtual classrooms, biometric attendance and WiFi facility in universities. Besides the field of education, the state government is also making use of technology in almost all departments right from government offices to policing. Naidu also said that like Aadhaar (to authenticate a person’s identity), there would be “Budhar” in AP to give unique identity to land, which would also make transactions easy.
Minister of state for HRD Satya Pal Singh said the Centre would pursue its Centres for Excellence in education initiative in AP, as per the request of Chandrababu Naidu. According to Singh, the major challenge would be inculcating human values among children. Having worked in the police department for almost three decades, Singh said he had witnessed a number of suicide cases, which was almost six times more than the number of murders.
The cases of abandoned children point out how far education had imparted values in the lives of human beings, he said. Former president of Kyrgyzstan Ms Roza Otunbayeva, and state HRD Ganta Srinivasa Rao were among those present on the occasion.