Ghar tak Fiber Scheme – Burning Issues

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BIHAR CONNECT

The government’s ambitious ‘Ghar Tak Fibre’ scheme — which aims to connect all the villages with high-speed internet — is off to a slow start in poll-bound Bihar, the first state that aims to connect all its 45,945 villages by March 31
To connect all villages by March 31, the state would need to dig trenches, lay cables, and provide connectivity to an average of 257 villages daily, or a monthly average of over 7,500 villages. However, nearly a month after the scheme was inaugurated, optical fibre cable has been laid only in 4,347 villages as of October 14, or at the rate of 181 villages per day.

“Our present capacity is laying down between 80,000-100,000 km of optical fibre per year. To connect all the villages by March 31, 2021, we will need to lay down at least 200,000-225,000 km of optical fibre, which is a tough task,” an official said.
On September 21, while inaugurating the ‘Ghar Tak Fibre’ scheme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said all 45,945 Bihar villages would be connected through the high-speed optical fibre.

The tender for providing connections and ‘lighting’ up these villages has not been floated so far and is likely to be floated only in the first week of November, senior government officials said.
A village or a gram panchayat (GP) is considered ‘lit up’ under BharatNet when it consistently has internet connection and users at the end to verify the same. Of the 8,745 GPs in Bihar, 5,889 were connected to the state’s main internet grid under BharatNet phase one, while the remaining 2,856 were connected under phase two.
However, of all the GPs connected under phase one, about 60 per cent or 3,591 gram panchayats were non-operational as of October 15, while the status of another 200 was unclear.

Under the Ghar Tak Fibre scheme, Bihar has to provide at least five fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections per village, while there should also be at least one WiFi hotspot per village. However, as of October 14, only 30,768 FTTH connections had been given, while only 2,531 WiFi hotspots had been installed so far under BharatNet phase one.
The BharatNet project, which initially began as the National Optical Fibre Network in October 2011, has been delayed for over 92 months now. The new deadline is set at August 2021. However, on August 15 this year, the PM said all villages in the country would be connected to the internet over the next 1,000 days, which means that the project is now likely to be completed only by 2024.