Broadband village dream may remain just like that

Hyderabad: Provision of broadband connectivity to more than 6,000 out of 8,684 villages in the State may remain a distant dream.

According to sources, the public-sector Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), which has to provide broadband connectivity to the villages, as part of implementing the overall e-governance planning in the States, expressed its inability to lay cables to villages.

Speaking to The Hans India, a senior official from the Panchayat Raj and Rural Development Ministry said the issue had come up for discussion between the officials of BSNL. It was during these meetings that senior officials from the BSNL had expressed their inability to lay cables to the villages to provide broadband connectivity.

The major reason cited by the BSNL officials was that they had to invest lakhs of rupees, to lay cable lines to each village. But, the return on investment (RoI) on the BSNL investments over each cable line will remain very notional, given the number of users.

Citing these factors, the BSNL officials had expressed their inability to provide broadband connectivity to the villages in Telangana State, as “it is not viable for them to make such investments, at a time, when they have been facing tough competition, from the private telecom companies,” the official pointed out.

At present, there are about 300 Mee Seva centres and about 600 banking centres run by the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) functioning with internet connectivity carrying out various transactions, he said Following these developments, the PR & RD Department is preparing plans to use Point of Sale (POS) machines, with the launch of 4G services by the BSNL as well as other private telecom providers.

The main objective to introduce the POS machines was that the POS machines could be used both offline and online mode.

The village panchayat officials could enter details of house tax collections and other transactions, through POS facility offline mode. As soon as the POS machine enters in a 4G coverage area, the details of transactions carried out offline mode, will automatically uploaded to the main servers.

There will not be any loss of data of transactions and the entire process could be carried out seamlessly between the offline and online modes, he said. It was against this backdrop that the PR & RD Department has drafted plans to deploy POS machines with 4G connectivity to carryout transactions at the village Panchayat level, the sources said.