Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday said one lakh gram panchayats will get optical fibre cable network by the end of this year.
“The timeline for connecting 1 lakh Gram Panchayats (GPs) with Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) to provide broadband connectivity under phase 1 has been revised to December 31, 2016,” minister said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.
Under the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project, the NDA government had planned to connect 50,000 GPs by March 2015, another 1 lakh by March 2016 and rest of the one lakh by December 2016.
“Considering the vastness of project execution, the very limited resources deployed by the institutions, time required for tendering, mobilisation of physical resources... the time line for completion of NOFN project could not be met,” Prasad said.
The government had approved NOFN project worth around Rs 20,100 crore in 2011 for facilitating at least 100 megabit per second bandwidth in all the estimated 2.5 lakh GPs.
Published 24 February 2016, 18:46 IST