Government's Digital India Initiative Brings High Speed Internet To 50,000 Villages

Government of India's novel initiative known as 'Digital India' is an umbrella programme coordinated by DeitY (Department of Electronics and Information Technology), which pulls together many existing schemes and restructures them to be implemented in a synchronised manner. Under the Digital India program, the Government had set out to bring digital infrastructure as a utility to every citizen in India. One vision area for this was bringing high speed internet to thousands of cities and villages in the country. Under the public internet access program now renamed as 'BharatNet', the government is aiming to coverage 2,50,000 Gram Panchayats by the end of 2016. And guess what, the Government has already become successful in rolling out the fibre optic network across 50,000 panchayats by March 31, 2015.

During this national rural internet mission, it has come to light that the new government's scale of implementation has been 375% higher than the previous regime. Under the new banner name 'BharatNet', more than 1600 kms of optical fibre has been laid out to reach 20,000 VPs and the work at another 10,000 VPs is nearing completing.

bharatnet-digital-india-internet-village-program
With the current speed of progress, it won't be an overstatement to say that the government should be able to achieve the target of digitally empowering entire India by bringing high speed broadband internet access to millions. With the integration of SWAN, NKN, NOFN, a project slated to be implemented in the next 2 years will have an overall cost of approx. Rs. 16,000 crore.

In the next steps of development, under the Digital India initiative, the government hopes to bring e-governance services uniform across departments or jurisdictions, ability to make financial transactions electronic & cashless, leveraging GIS for decision support systems etc. Moreover, we could also witness programs that promote universally accessible digital resources in all Indian languages and portability of all entitlements through cloud.

What are your thoughts on the Digital India initiative? Share with us in comments below.

Source: National optical fibre network renamed as BharatNet - The Economic Times

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