Digital India Push: Government Plans To Cover All Gram Panchayats With Wi-Fi By 2019
The Modi government is in final stages of formulating a new telecom policy which is likely to come out by the end of this year. Under the new policy, the centre is planning to make Wi-Fi facility available to all 2.5 lakh panchayats by 2019. These GPs serve over six lakh villages in the country. The whole project is expected to cost around Rs 3,700 crore.
Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told Press Trust of India that the tender process will start this month.
In September, we expect to put out tender for Wi-Fi coverage in 2.5 lakh GPs (gram panchayats) by March 2019. This is a big goal. This will mean that if we are able to put out Wi-Fi access in literally every GP, 5.5 lakh villages will actually have access to mobile broadband.
Once the facilities are in place, rural Indians will be able to access Internet at 1 Gigabyte per second (Gbps) speed. The project is part of BharatNet project under which the government is laying down network of optical fibre cable throughout the country is working on a mission mode to connect all GPs by 2019.
As of 3 September, the government has laid down fibre optic cables in over 1 lakh Gps. The rest 1.5 lakh GPs will be connected in the second phase of the project. Sundararajan told PTI:
1 lakh Wi-Fi will be used under BharatNet service. The other 1.5 lakh need not be on BharatNet from day 1. Once we complete BharatNet, we will integrate all Wi-Fi backward to the BharatNet.
The government is looking to increase internet penetration to 70 crore people by 2022 from 45 crore today - an astonishing rise of 25 crore new consumers in just five years at the rate of adding five crore new customers a year.