Budget: Rs 10,000 crore allocated for rural broadband push in Bharat Net

Jaitley says, high speed broadband will be available in 150,000 gram panchayats via Wifi hotspots

In Union Budget 2017-18, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has allocated Rs 10,000 crore to expand the Bharat Net Project in FY-18, to fast track the project to provide optic fibre connectivity to all villages that has been behind schedule.

Jaitley, while presenting the Budget said that by 2017-18-end high speed broadband will be available in 150,000 gram panchayats via Wifi hotspots. So far, only 16,037 gram panchayats have been connected with high speed broadband, according to the orgnaisation website. The project aims to cover 2.5 lakh gram panchayats.

Bharat Broadband Network Ltd (BBNL) is the agency that is building the optical fibre network to connect over 250,000 gram panchayats and touch over 600 million rural Indians under the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project or popularly called the BharatNet project. The aim is to provide 2-20 Mbps bandwidth to individual houses.

BBNL uses the infrastructure of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, RailTel Corp of India Ltd and Power Grid Corp of India Ltd to provide broadband connectivity to these gram panchayats and help villagers access e-governance services at their place. The broadband network could also be used to offer entertainment services to the population.