New telecom policy to be out by Feb: Manoj Sinha
The government expects to complete the first phase of the BharatNet project to connect 1 lakh village panchayats to high-speed broadband by the end of November this year
The department of telecommunications (DoT) plans to finalise the new telecom policy by February next year while a draft would be ready by the year-end.
"We are trying to bring new telecom policy by February. For this, the working group has started the process. We expect to finalise draft by end of December and place it for public comments," the Communications Minister Manoj Sinha said on Tuesday.
The government expects to complete the first phase of the BharatNet project to connect 1 lakh village panchayats to high-speed broadband by the end of November this year. Private players, including Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, have evinced interest in participating in BharatNet.
Airtel has shown interest in 10,000 village blocks for 1Gbps connectivity while Reliance Jio wants to work in in 30,000 villages in addition to the proposed plans by Vodafone India and Idea Cellular, Sinha said.
The department has come out with a tariff plan that varies from Rs 700 per Mbps for upto 10 Mbps and Rs 200 per Mbps for 1 Gbps per annually. For symmetrical bandwidth between a block to gram panchayat, Rs 1,000 per Mbps up to 10Mbps, and Rs 500 per Mbps for 100 Mbps per annum have been prescribed.
The government has also fixed Rs 2,250 for a km to make use of dark fibre that can be leased by private companies and public sector undertakings (PSUs).
The BharatNet project will connect 2.5 lakh gram panchayats by March 2019. "With 2.37 lakh kilometres of optic fibre cable or OFC laid under the first phase, it facilitated man base (employment creation) of 7.9 crore. For the second phase, a work base of 8.76 crore will be required to deploy 2.63 lakh kilometres of OFC," Sinha said. The installation of 2.5 lakh Wi-Fi hotspots under the project would also employ about five lakh people, he added, specifying the employment generation opportunities being created by BharatNet.
DoT secretary Aruna Sundararajan said that the government will not disconnect mobile numbers of people who do not have the UIDAI number. She said that the department is waiting for the Supreme Court judgement on Aadhaar issue to decide on action to be taken for mobile numbers of those people who have Aadhaar but do not want to link it with their mobile number. "We are also working on alternatives for people who are abroad (to help them link their mobile number with Aadhaar)," Sundararajan said.