During his Independence Day address, the Prime Minister announced the Digital India initiative, which will cost the nation Rs 1.13 lakh crore. The vision of a digitally connected India to deliver various government services to the remotest corner of the country is quite innovative and bold. However, one of the essential prerequisites is the nationwide connectivity which is sought to be achieved through the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project.

The minister of communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad informed the Lok Sabha that the government would connect 2.25 lakh gram panchayats using the NOFN by 2017 (the NOFN project was launched by the UPA government in 2011). The dateline for connecting all gram panchayats was March 2014. Going by the statement of Prasad, we are already three years behind the schedule. And according to the chairman of Trai, it is doubtful whether the NOFN project will be completed even by 2019, as only 8% of the 1.8 lakh km of optical fibre ordered has been delivered so far. Further, of the 6 lakh km of planned ducting, only about 2,000 km has been completed, while the actual cable pulled is just 250 km, or about 0.05% of the target. The progress of the project is painfully slow due to the difficulty in laying optical fibre cables in remote and rural areas, and in difficult terrains such as the forests of Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh, and in hilly areas of the North-East and Ladakh.

For such areas, terrestrial telecom systems do not provide an economically viable solution. For nearly 30 years, satellites have been used to provide communications to vast areas in the world. Majority of the satellites have been launched and maintained at the high altitude (36,000 km) geostationary orbit. Although such satellites are suitable for one-way radio communication, such as TV transmission, they are not suitable for real-time interactive communication, such as voice telephony, because of one-fourth of a second of transmission delay, which seriously degrades the quality of voice communication due to echo problems. This delay?called ?latency? in technical jargon?should not exceed one-tenth of a second for good quality voice and video communication. Therefore, we need non-geostationary satellites, also called low earth orbit satellites, to provide good quality communication, including broadband services.

With the recent success of the ISRO in launching five foreign satellites, the organisation should now accept the challenge of launching satellites in low earth orbit. The government should ask the ISRO to launch a constellation of low earth orbit satellites that can provide a celestial backup network, thereby providing a reliable and resilient national communication infrastructure. Although a number of low earth orbit satellite-based personal communications service (PCS) systems were conceived in the early 1990s, only two such systems are in existence. One is the well-known Iridium system conceived and executed by the Motorola Corporation of the US, and the other is the Globalstar project executed by a consortium of companies led by Qualcomm of the US. Other projects, one of them called the ?fibre in the space? named Teledesic could not take off, because of the spread of cellular mobile telecommunications and high costs involved. Iridium Next Generation is currently being developed in the US. It is planned for launch in the 2015-17 timeframe to provide broadband connectivity to remote areas. Even the Teledesic project is being revisited.

During the last two decades there has been a dramatic fall in microelectronic costs. Low earth orbit satellite systems employ lighter satellites weighing less than 500 kg and are easier to launch. However, a large number of them are required, compared to the geostationary systems, which require just three or four satellites to cover the entire globe. For example, the Globalstar employs 48 satellites in eight planes orbiting at an altitude of 1,406 km to cover the planet. If only India is to be covered, the number will be much less. The ISRO could execute the space segment of the project and subcontract the ground segment to private sector MNCs who have adequate experience in Satcom systems design. Ground segment consists of gateways connecting the satellite-based telecom system to the public switched fixed/mobile (PSTN/PLMN) networks to provide full connectivity to the country. Dual mode (cellular/satellite) handset is another area where foreign collaboration may be required.

Such a project will provide connectivity to the remotest corner of the country as well as in the Maoist areas of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha. The cellular network in such areas is difficult to maintain. Insurgents can easily blow up cellular towers and disrupt communications, whereas a satellite-based commendation system will be operational all the time. It can also be equipped with surveillance cameras so as to provide real-time intelligence to security agencies. Such a system will be an invaluable tool in safeguarding our borders in the remote areas of the North-East and Ladakh. With the help of such a surveillance system, our armed forces will be able to detect Kargil-type incursions in real-time.

It is high time the government undertakes such a project and provides a complimentary celestial network to exiting terrestrial systems which have their limitations. The entire project, which can be financed from the Universal Service Obligation Fund, can be executed in 18 months if a project management group is set up in the PMO with the participation of relevant organisations.

The author is former member, Trai and Telecom Commission