The Hindu Business Line : New rollout: Mobile phone services to 2.5 lakh remote villages soon

The lone man staying in a village called Henry Island in the Andamans will soon be able to communicate with the rest of the world using a mobile phone. So will the people living in a single household village of Chingraliang in Arunachal Pradesh.

The mobile services project being undertaken by the Government under the Universal Services Obligation is expected to cover 2.5 lakh remote villages across the country, size varying from a single household village to those having a few hundred people. What is common though is that people living in any of these villages, spread across 27 States, have never known about mobile services.

Uttar Pradesh with 38,763 villages under the project is the biggest beneficiary followed by Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

The Department of Telecom has shortlisted 21 companies to set up the passive infrastructure for rolling out 10,000 towers across these villages with financial support from the Universal Services Obligation fund.

Under the proposed infrastructure project, only those rural and remote areas will be covered, where fixed wireless or mobile services are not being provided currently.

Mobile operators currently cover only 25 per cent of the country's geographical area. Therefore, the new project will be focussed entirely on rural and remote areas and towns and cities will be excluded from the purview of the project.

The DoT has already plotted the location of the existing towers on a GIS map and the same is being utilised for this project to enable identification of rural and remote areas not covered by mobile services.

Rural India comprises 6,38,499 villages, out of which about 44,856 villages are uninhabited as per the Census 2001. The remaining 5,94,000 inhabited villages account for 72.22 per cent of the total population of the country.

Most of these villages only have a partially functional village public telephone system. The current rural teledensity is about 1.84 per cent as compared to urban teledensity of 49.53 per cent.