At 56%, rural teledensity and broadband target lag way behind Urban India

Broadband connectivity to villages has been lagging, with delay in laying of an optical fibre network up to gram panchayats

The updated National Telecom Policy (NTP), currently being finalised, is expected to give attention on the digital divide between rural and urban areas.

In the earlier NTP, issued in 2012, the target was to increase rural teledensity to 70 per cent by 2017 and to 100 per cent by 2020. Despite all the effort and growth of wireless broadband, the figure was only 56.7 per cent at the end of December 2017.

Similarly, broadband connectivity to villages has been lagging, with delay in laying of an optical fibre network (OFN) up to gram panchayats. In NTP 2012, an aim was