Trai Chairman R S Sharma said on Wednesday that the Authority has recommended to the government that for the successful completion of the Bharat Net project, private sector should also be roped in under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode.

“We have recommended to the government to implement Bharat Net in a public private partnership (PPP) mode. This is extremely important because Bharat Net is a project which seeks to connect every panchayat through the optical fibre cable pop and there are 2.5 lakh panchayats out of 6 lakh villages. So essentially every two or three villages or clusters will be having a pop. So after this one can have Wi-Fi solutions, etc and this is a very ambitious programme. We are going to spend `1.20 lakh crore, which is about $20 billion, on this programme,” he said at the India Internet Conference, organised by Ficci.

Elaborating on partnership, Sharma said that for the government to construct, maintain and market a project, most of the times becomes difficult as the number of stakeholders are in thousands and coordination issues crop in.

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Trai has been pursuing the issue and has held consultations on it, he said adding that for a programme to succeed there should be an alignment of interest of all the stakeholders. If all the stakeholders in the value chain have similar interests, then it will succeed.

“So we have recommended that let there be a BOOT model. Some entrepreneur who Builds, let him Own, then Operate and finally at the end of the lease let him Transfer or if he wants to continue then continue. So we have done that and we have also said that wherever construction has happened then we can do the operation, maintenance, marketing other kind of things on a transparent basis to entrepreneurs. Government is considering those recommendations,” the Trai chief explained.

The government is implementing the national optical fibre network, through which it aims to connect 2.5 lakh gram panchayats through high speed broadband. At present, the first phase of the project is under implementation under which a little over a lakh panchayats were to be connected by March 2017.