Ghar Tak Fibre Scheme: Bihar

• 19 Oct 2020

Why in News

Recently, the Prime Minister of India inaugurated ‘Ghar Tak Fibre’ scheme in Bihar.

Key Points

• Ghar Tak Fibre Scheme:
  
  • It aims to connect all 45,945 villages of Bihar with high-speed optical fibre internet by 31^st March 2021.
  • Under the scheme, Bihar has to provide at least five fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections per village and at least one WiFi hotspot per village.
  • The Scheme will be implemented by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• Benefit:
  
  • The Scheme will lead digital services including e-Education, e-Agriculture, Tele-Medicine, Tele-law and other social security schemes in Bihar ensuring easy access to all state natives.
  • It is also likely to boost the local employment generation with the implementation of Bharat Net initiative which will be done by recruiting local workers.
• Internet Penetration in Bihar:
  
  • According to TRAI’s report, only 30.35% Bihar’s population has internet connectivity, much below India's population connectivity of 55%.
  • Only 22.61% of the rural Bihar have an internet connection. Compared to this Kerala has 98.10% rural internet connectivity.
  • Bihar also has the lowest urban internet subscribers amounting to 73.26% of the urban population. States like Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal all have an urban subscriber base above 90%.
  • However, of the 8,745 gram panchayat (GP) in Bihar, almost all are connected to the state’s main internet grid under BharatNet Project.
    
    • BharatNet, a special purpose vehicle envisaged in 2011, was an ambitious plan to connect all the 2,50,000 gram panchayats through a high-speed optical network.
      
      • Initially it was launched as National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN), it was renamed as BharatNet Project in 2015.
    • Under the BharatNet Project a village or a gram panchayat (GP) is considered ‘lit up’ when it consistently has internet connection and users at the end to verify the same.
• Challenges:
  
  • Of all the GPs of Bihar connected under phase one, 3,591 gram panchayats are non-operational, while the status of another 200 is unclear.
  • The main problems are lack of power and related equipment failure, equipment theft, and faulty fibre.
  • While optical fibre cable has been laid to connect nearly all the GPs, lack of users in these areas has resulted in minimal or zero follow-ups on repair and maintenance work.

Way Forward

• The Ghar Tak Fibre scheme marks a step towards the prime minister’s announcement on 15^th August 2020, that all six lakh villages in India will be connected with optical fibre internet in the next 1,000 days (by 2024).
• India’s telecom sector has come a long way through the adoption of mobile technologies. However, for India to emerge as a dominant digital economy, the government needs to prioritize achievable targets and ensure the implementation of the initiatives.

Source: IE