Dot Cuts Target For Village Telephones

The department of telecommunications (DoT) is setting up a realistic plan to meet its village telephone connectivity targets for the current fiscal year. Instead of the 87,000 village public telephones (VPTs) that the department wanted to set up initially, it is now targetting 40,000.

Telecom secretary A V Gokak revealed this while elaborating the reasons for DoT's continual failure in meeting its VPT targets in the past four-five years. According to the National Telecom Policy of 1994, the department was to have achieved 100 per cent village connectivity by April 1997 _ a target which has been postponed to April 2002.

"There is no point having an official estimate which is difficult to achieve. It will be much better to set a realistic target and try to achieve it," said Gokak. DoT has missed its VPT targets in the last few years consistently. As of end of last fiscal, the department had installed public telephones only in some three lakh villages out of the over six lakh in the country. While it set itself a target of 87,000 VPTs last year, it hardly was able to rollout services in some 20,000 villages.

The department has cited "commercial, technological and maintenance problems" for the shortfall in VPT rollout. The commercial problems comprise basically the delays at DoT's end while finalising tenders for VPT equipment.

The technological problems, DoT officials said, mainly emanated from choice of wrong technologies while implementing VPT targets. The department has been relying on a near-obsolete technologies like multiple access rural radio (MARR) to connect villages to its telecom network.

Late last year, the department decided that it would utilise only digital MARR systems and not the analog models, which have frequent breakdown problems once they are installed in rural environs. While taking the decision, DoT expressed its preference for digital wireless in local loop (WLL) solutions to roll-out into villages.

However, the department brass is of the view that WLL technologies have not been proven in rural conditions and therefore cannot be used to install VPTs. Said Gokak: "WLL technolgies like CDMA (code division multiple access) have been proven in urban places, but not in rural conditions. If any of the companies want to do so, we are willing to accept experimental sites."