N. Ravi Shanker is full of anticipation about the mammoth and ambitious project that the government has launched to provide internet and broadband access to millions of villagers. The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project emerged from the government?s realisation that it had a sum of more than Rs 160 billion lying in the USO Fund, the raison d?etre of which is to take telecommunications to the villages.
On one side was this generous pile of money. On the other side was the fact that India has only about 13.4 million broadband connections. ?The government decided it made sense to launch a mega project of the kind never attempted before. In October 2011, the NOFN was sanctioned. It entails adding about 500,000 km of optic fibre from the development blocks right down to 250,000 gram panchayats. We are looking at broadband the same way as we look at other basic facilities such as bijli, pani aur sadak (electricity, water and roads). We have to take broadband to the villages to offer people e-learning, telemedicine, e-commerce and e-governance,? he says.
The cost of the NOFN is estimated at Rs 200 billion. Once it is implemented in 2014, it will offer bandwidth of 100 Mpbs at the gram panchayat level, instead of the current availability of 2 Mbps. This sort of bandwidth is essential if internet access is to be used for telemedicine and long distance teaching, which entail the use of videos.
A special purpose vehicle, Bharat Broadband Network, has been set up to oversee the execution of the project being undertaken by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), Powergrid and RailTel, which will lay optic fibre cables either on their transmission lines or along roads and railway tracks.
?The project will be a game changer. Taking broadband to the a empowers people. Empowered people can seek their own employment and chart their own destinies. India should be a changed place 10 years down the road. Taking the information highway to remote areas will bring inclusive growth and employment opportunities,? he says.
The possibilities are attractive. As Ravi Shanker points out, once computers and the internet are available in rural areas, India will be able to have business process outsourcing units in these areas, a move that will help defuse the challenge that has recently come from countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines. It will make it possible for a Gurgaon or a Noida to emerge in the countryside.
And if villagers can use computers and the internet, then India might also embark on digitising its own voluminous data so that the right to information becomes more meaningful and substantial than it is at present. ?Digitising this data will also generate jobs. Just look at the possibilities for content providers, who will have to provide it in regional languages,? he notes.
Ravi Shanker had his education at Loyola College, Chennai, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. His first job was with the Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC). After leaving CMC, he joined Crompton Greaves in the marketing department in Chennai in 1978.
In 1980, he joined the IAS and was assigned the Uttar Pradesh cadre and thereafter, in 2000, the newly carved out state of Uttarakhand. He believes that, despite the number of career options now available to young Indians, the IAS still offers a good career option, especially for those who have a ?real flair for meeting people and trying to solve their problems?.
He declares himself ?reasonably satisfied? with what he has achieved in the IAS in his 32-year-long career with its varied assignments. Of these 32 years, around 20 were spent in Uttar Pradesh, where he handled the housing, education and many other portfolios.
Later, when he was with the Uttarakhand government, he enjoyed a particularly satisfying assignment as secretary, education. At the time, there was an urgent need to recruit teachers to fill a huge shortage. ?We decided to get para- teachers because there was no time to get permanent staff. Para-teachers are people from the local area, who are given training and sent to schools in far-flung areas. It worked really well and we raised the human development index of the state. This concept could be used elsewhere to solve the teacher shortage problem in rural areas. I felt very satisfied with this job because if you can address some of the key issues in education, you are doing something solid and lasting,? he says.
His other very satisfying assignment was as principal secretary, power, in Uttarakhand. Among other things, he coordinated the efforts to facilitate the commissioning of the Tehri dam project. As a young officer posted in Uttarkashi in 1983, he used to travel past the spot where work was going on in the very early stages of the project. Finally, after a long gap, the project was commissioned in 2006 at a time when he was in the power department.
He says the rehabilitation necessitated by Tehri has been successful ?by and large?. ?The lesson of Tehri and the rehabilitation is that you have to take a whole village and relocate the people as a group, including all the relatives. You have to move the entire community. It?s a sociological issue. You have to respect the human angle,? he says.
Coming back to the USO Fund, Ravi Shanker explains how the origins of the concept of universal service go back about a hundred years to the US, where it was conceived when telegraphy was in its infancy and the need arose to take services to rural areas.
In India, he likens the development of telecom services to trains of different speeds. Between 1950 and 1990, it moved at the pace of a mail train, during 1990-2000, it was at the speed of an express train, during 2000-05, at the speed of a Rajdhani, and then during 2005-10, it zipped like a bullet train.
The USO Fund began almost a decade ago by taking village public telephones (VPTs) to rural areas so that at least one phone was available to villagers. When BSNL was told to spread out into the rural areas, it lacked the finances. Phone connections in rural areas were just not a commercially viable proposition. That?s when the USO Fund was set up, allowing the government to set aside a portion of telecom operators? licence fees to be used to spread services to rural India.
According to Ravi Shanker, the ideas for projects that will take landline or mobile connections to rural areas can come from any source ? from a telecom company, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, the Department of Telecommunications. All the ideas are put through a rigorous consultation process. The ideas are further developed and refined. Then, the final scheme is put out to elicit bids. ?Whoever offers the lowest bid, whoever asks for the least subsidy from the government, wins the scheme in a transparent bidding process,? he says.
Once the bid selection process is over, an agreement is signed between the USO Fund and the bidder on the terms and conditions of the execution of the scheme. Penalties are imposed on a company if the project suffers a delay in implementation.
In the early days of the USO Fund, it was mainly VPTs that were set up in villages. But with 97 per cent of the country?s villages having public telephones, the emphasis in 2006 shifted to taking broadband and mobile telephony infrastructure to the countryside.
Ravi Shanker took over as administrator of the USO Fund in December 2011 and has been coming up to speed on the topic. The posting fits in neatly with many of his earlier postings, such as in the Department of Information Technology, first as joint secretary and later as additional secretary.
Home for Ravi Shanker at the moment is Delhi. And though most of his relatives live in Chennai, he would prefer to retire to a place like Dehradun, where he spent several years while he was with the Uttarakhand government and where he grew to love the mountains.
A reticent man, he dislikes talking about himself. He made sure he talked about the USO Fund for the bulk of the interview and when the questions switched to him, the interview drew to a close. All he agreed to reveal about himself, before ushering in his next visitor, was that he enjoys reading and watching sports on television.
