NOFN work speed needs to rise by 50 times to meet target

The pace of work for government's key broadband project, National Optical Fibre Network, needs to ramped up by 50 times to meet target, according to an official source.
"Current rate of work needs to be ramped up by 50 times to achieve target by March 2015. Though DoT had initially decided to cover 50,000 village panchayats but PMO wants the project to be completed by March 2016. By March 2015, we will need to roll out NOFN in about 1 lakh village panchayats," the source said.
To cover about 1 lakh village panchayats, about 2.17 lakh kilometres of incremental cable has to be laid down and 7,188 kilometers of pipe. However, about 3.3 per cent of total pipes and 1.62 per cent of cable has been laid so far by three public sector units involved in the project.

The source said about 1,150 tenders for the project have been finalised for 3,000 blocks by the three public sector units- BSNL, Power Grid and RailTel but work has started only in 10 per cent of the blocks.
An internal DoT team has identified variation in rates of materials, delay in finalisation of tenders, use of conventional methods, non-availability of required materials, among the reasons for delay in execution of project.
Through NOFN, the DoT had set a target to connect all 2.5 lakh village panchayats by high speed broadband network by March 2017. At the instance of PMO, DoT is pushing to finish the project earlier than envisaged.

The UPA government had cleared the NOFN for Rs 20,000 crore to be rolled out through a special purpose vehicle BBNL but could not roll it out beyond pilot project in 3 blocks.