BHUBANESWAR: With the Centre emphasising on cashless and digital payment system following demonetisation, the Odisha government is planning to launch a survey to determine mobile connectivity in the state.
Sources said that the Block Development Officers (BDOs) will be roped into to supervise the survey in their areas.
The survey will be part of the country-wide exercise to be launched by the Department of Telecommunications in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to determine the extent of mobile connectivity in rural areas.
The BDOs will conduct a detailed survey taking the support of block and panchayat level functionaries to determine the penetration of service providers like BSNL, Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance, Jio, Aircel and others in villages. The government of India has developed a web portal for uploading the data on mobile connectivity in every village.
However, the survey is going to be a daunting task as many villages remain inaccessible because of poor road connectivity. As many tribal dominated villages do not have approach roads, they will remain outside the reach of the survey.
After receiving instructions from the Centre to conduct a survey, Department of Electronics and Information Technology has requested the Panchayati raj department to engage the block and panchayat level machinery to launch the exercise.
The state government, however, maintained that banking infrastructure connectivity should be improved substantially in the rural areas from the present level for the effective implementation of digital payment system.
Chief secretary AP Padhi had suggested this in the chief ministers' committee meeting on digital payment held recently at New Delhi through video conference.
Though banks in rural areas have 3G/4G connections for their card swapping machines, frequent disconnections are a problem. About 60 per cent of the rural banking sub service areas do not have adequate internet connectivity for supporting 3900 Micro ATMs and mobile POS machines.
The failure rate of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) transaction on feature phones in rural areas is also quite high at 60-75 percent. Besides, the banking presence in remote areas is quite insufficient and telecom and mobile connectivity also need immediate improvement.