Rural workers under the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) scheme will now help usher in a broadband revolution in the country. In an innovative and ambitious project, the government has hit upon the idea of tweaking the scheme to lay a 12-lakh km, countrywide optic-fibre network at an overall investment of Rs 40,000 crore over the next five years. Since a major chunk of this would be the wage cost, the government proposes to tap the NREGA programme.
Those provided work under the scheme will be asked to dig trenches and perform associated construction work for the network, thereby shaving Rs 20,000 crore off the cost of the project as they would be paid from NREGA funds with the rural development ministry. The remainder would be tapped from the universal service obligation (USO) fund, in which around Rs 14,000 crore is currently lying unutilised.
?Since NREGA cannot be utilised for this project in its current form, certain changes would have to be made to it,? an official involved in conceptualising the project told FE. The USO fund, on the other hand, is meant for rural telecom and broadband projects.
The Cabinet secretariat has already given the project its go-ahead and a group has been constituted to draft its details, which will shortly be put before a group of ministers. Other than the rural development ministry, the project would involve the panchayati raj ministry, HRD ministry, and the communications & IT ministry, which would act as the nodal agency. Globally, Australia, the US and China have such optic-fibre networks.
New legislation would also be enacted bringing uniformity to charges paid to state governments and local municipal agencies to dig routes for laying the optic fibre. The project would be synchronised with the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, wherein ducts are laid during the construction of roads so that separate digging can be kept to a minimum.
The proposed network would vest with a newly created National Optic Fibre Authority and would be leased to telecom players to provide broadband connections on a large-scale, particularly to villages. Currently, the lack of an optic-fibre network with telecom operators acts as a constraint to broadband penetration. Only 8-lakh km of optic-fibre lines are available in the country, of which three-quarters belongs to state-owned BSNL.
?The idea is to give broadband penetration a massive boost and further propel growth in the communications sector by taking it to the countryside and providing a platform to launch healthcare and education programmes,? officials said. India has only 6.5 million broadband users. According to a World Bank report, every 10% growth in broadband services leads to a 1% growth in GDP.