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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday held a review meeting with Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan to take stock of projects and updates on the telecom industry.
Sources close to the development told BusinessLine that various issues were discussed, including BharatNet, mobile connectivity in the North-East and the state of the operators.
“A number of issues and topics were discussed to understand the status of the industry and the progress on the projects undertaken by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT),” said a senior government official, requesting anonymity.
The official said the PMO takes such review meetings time to time as these projects are important and would benefit the common man and provide a host of services, including financial inclusion in rural areas.
Sources said that since Digital India is one of the key projects of this government, the Prime Minister is keen to know the progress of the BharatNet project, as it aims to connect 2.50 lakh gram panchayats (GPs) through broadband by March 2019.
The first phase of the BharatNet project is still going on, and around 80,000 GPs have so far been provided with broadband connectivity, sources said.
Wi-Fi connectivityAccording to them, the DoT is also likely to float a tender in a week’s time for rolling out Wi-Fi services in all village panchayats by 2019 with an outlay of around ₹3,700 crore. Under the project, the government expects to provide broadband services with about 1 Gbps speed across one lakh GPs by this year-end.
Sundararajan had earlier said that the government had expedited the commissioning of broadband services under BharatNet by seven times in August — from installation of around 150 electronic equipment a day to 800 a day.
She had also recently said that the telecom infrastructure will grow massively over the next 2-3 years backed by an investment of ₹1.3 lakh crore on expansion and upgradation.
Some of the recent developments include the Telecom Commission (TC) clearing Airtel’s bid to install nearly 2,000 mobile towers in the North-East for ₹1,660 crore under the government-funded Comprehensive Telecom Development Plan for the North-Eastern Region.
The TC had also approved a tender of ₹2,258 crore for installing 2,817 mobile towers, covering 4,019 villages in Arunachal Pradesh and two districts of Assam.
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