Reliance Info gives a big push

Providing internet to 630 towns and 83,000 villages in UP and Uttaranchal

Reliance Infocomm, the largest CDMA mobile phone operator in Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal, will soon provide Internet connectivity to 630 towns and 83,000 villages in the two states.

The Internet connectivity project, part of the second phase of the expansion plan of Reliance, is targeted for completion by December.

V V Singh, the chief operating officer for UP and Uttaranchal, said Internet connectivity would be provided in 23 national highways, 51 state highways, and 13 rail routes, besides the pilgrimages of Hardwar, Kedarnath, and Badrinath in Uttaranchal. Reliance is the first private operator to reach the remote area of Dharchula, close to the Indo-China border in Pithoragarh.

In UP, the Net service will cover Chitrakoot in the Bundelkhand region of the state, bordering Madhya Pradesh.

In the second phase of the expansion project, Reliance Infocomm will cover 546 more towns by December, besides 35,000 villages in UP. The company has so far set up 310 BTS towers in the UP circle. The third phase of the expansion project will begin in January next year.

In the first phase of the project, Reliance Infocomm laid 4,101 km of optical fibre cable network in UP. Over 3,370 km is to be added in the second phase of the project, taking the total length of the network in the UP circle to 7,478 km by the end of December.

Pankaj Rajpal, chief of the project, said two-thirds of the population still lived in villages, where the benefits of information technology were yet to set in. He said Reliance had designed its Internet connectivity project keeping in view the ground realities of the Indian rural hinterland.

He said when the project was over, all villages would have access to the Net, at affordable rates. Rajpal said the penetration of personal computers was fast increasing. There were about 12 million PCs in the country, which was increasing at an annual rate of 40 per cent. The results of the high school and intermediate examinations conducted by the Uttar Pradesh Board of Secondary Education and also in Uttaranchal would be available on Reliance phones.

V V Singh said apart from the results of the exams of Class X and XII, the results of the common entrance test (CET), and the common pre-medical entrance test conducted by the UP board as well as national level exams like the CBSE Medical, AIEEE, AIIMS, CBSE Class X, CBSE XII, would also be available on Reliance mobile. These results are to be declared on May 23 2005. The results can be seen on R World as soon as they are announced by the respective examination-conducting bodies.

Nationally, some 80 results will be posted on R World over the next 30 days or so. These include key engineering and medical entrance examinations, besides various Class X and Class XII examinations

Reliance Infocomm has tied up with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE), and school boards of several states for the purpose.

Common network

• The Internet connectivity project, part of the second phase of the expansion plan of Reliance, is targeted for completion by December
• In the second phase of the expansion project, Reliance Infocomm will cover 546 more towns by December, besides 35,000 villages in UP
• The results of the high school and intermediate examinations conducted by the Uttar Pradesh Board of Secondary Education and also in Uttaranchal would be available on Reliance phones