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Freebies on way for panchayats, courtesy DoT
By siliconindia
|
Wednesday, 14 July 2010, 22:28 IST
New Delhi: The Department of Telecom (DoT) is pulling all stops in its bid to pursue the rural people to support the broadband infrastructure roll-out in the rural areas. In this regard, the DoT is rolling out a sea of freebies at the panchayat level, reports Thomas K. Thomas of Business Line.
The goodies planned by the DoT include giving three broadband connections to every gram panchayat free of charge for three years along with free installation of computer and printer; three telephone connections and one cable TV connection without any charge.
This would setback the DoT by about 
2,000 crore. The funding of the same will be done through the Universal Services Obligation fund.
The DoT hopes that through this move it will be able to convince villagers from creating any obstruction in their program. Also this will lead to the people having a firsthand experience of broadband and its benefits.
The major obstruction in the way is in the rolling out of the networks. The local self government agencies are in charge of the same and may not give permission without pecuniary allowances. Suggestions are also made to include the villagers in the project to lay cables or dig trenches for the cables.
The training and technical supervision for the same would be provided by the state run BSNL.
The project will connect 2.5 lakh villages with more than 500 inhabitants with the broadband infrastructure that includes 13,000 base stations for wireless technologies by laying 500,000 route km of optical fibre cable network.
The project would cost about 32,295 crore and is proposed to be done in two phases over a course of three years.
2,000 crore. The funding of the same will be done through the Universal Services Obligation fund.
The DoT hopes that through this move it will be able to convince villagers from creating any obstruction in their program. Also this will lead to the people having a firsthand experience of broadband and its benefits.
The major obstruction in the way is in the rolling out of the networks. The local self government agencies are in charge of the same and may not give permission without pecuniary allowances. Suggestions are also made to include the villagers in the project to lay cables or dig trenches for the cables.
The training and technical supervision for the same would be provided by the state run BSNL.
The project will connect 2.5 lakh villages with more than 500 inhabitants with the broadband infrastructure that includes 13,000 base stations for wireless technologies by laying 500,000 route km of optical fibre cable network.
The project would cost about 32,295 crore and is proposed to be done in two phases over a course of three years.