Finance Ministry Rejects Plan For Rs 5,000 Crore It Network

The finance ministry has rejected an ambitious plan of the ministry of information technology to build a network across the country with foreign collaboration.

The plan as envisaged by the IT ministry seeks to rope in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, to build a rural information technology network at a cost of Rs 5,000 crore over the next five years.

The project conceived by IT minister Pramod Mahajan follows the quiet burial to the controversial Sankhyavahini project which also sought to create an IT network across the country linking all institutions of higher learning.

But the first phase of new project has run into trouble as the expenditure finance committee has questioned its logic and spending pattern.

The IT ministry proposed that for the current fiscal a sum of Rs 65 crore would be spent on the project. Of this, only Rs 1 crore would be directly financed by its plan fund, while the balance Rs 64 crore would come from non-governmental organisations.

The finance ministry has raised doubts over the possibility of such mobilisation and has asked the ministry to specify the sources from where it can generate such funds.

Sources said the new project is quite vague on the funding pattern. The ministry has also not specified whether MIT, which will provide the technological support to the project will also pick up any stake as Carnegie Mellon did in the case of Sankhyavahini.

But given the financing needs of the project, it will not be possible to fund it from the annual plan of the ministry. The IT ministry has apparently sounded out several organisations within and outside the country to pick up a stake in the project.

Sankhyavahini had run into opposition as the idea of allowing any foreign entity unbridled access to the Internet backbone of the country was questioned.