CHENNAI: Villages in Tamil Nadu are likely to get high-speed internet connectivity within a year under the BharatNet Project (Tamil Nadu Fibernet Project). The State government will soon be signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Larsen and Toubro and ITI Limited for laying Optical Fiber Cables (OFC) to villages in delta and southern districts.
“All the 38 districts were to be covered under four packages. But the government decided to proceed with only two packages after the companies that had floated tenders for the other two moved court over certain issues,” said official sources.
Tamil Nadu FiberNet Corporation Limited (TANFINET), a State-owned company, will be executing the task by laying 49,500 km of OFC (under all the four packages). The project aims to offer speed not less than 1 GBPS. The tariff, sources said, would be fixed later. When the project was announced in 2015, it was said high-speed internet connections would be made available to the people in villages at cheaper rates.
Hoping that the works for the two packages would be completed quickly due to the fresh impetus given by the present government and the concessions announced, the official pointed out that the State government had declared this project as an infrastructure one and waived off ‘Right of Way charges’, supervision charges, reinstatement charges, and permission for laying of OFC (both underground and aerial) to ensure this is implemented in a hassle-free manner.
Also, to establish ‘point of presence’ from where the connectivity will be provided to each village, the TANFINET was given rights of permissions to access State government buildings at village, block, and district levels.
The BharatNet Project was caught in a controversy last year after Arappor Iyakkam, an NGO, filed a petition alleging irregularities in the tender process. In June 2020, the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry directed the Tamil Nadu FiberNet Corporation to scrap the tenders for the project and directed that fresh tenders be floated. Fresh tenders were floated in October 2020.