The newly appointed telecom secretary, Rakesh Garg, has stated that his primary focus will be on improving telecom infrastructure in the villages and ensuring that rural teledensity increases to 100 per cent.
“The prime objective will be to take broadband connectivity to village level by improving the telecom infrastructure. The second priority is to increase the rural telecom penetration from 44 per cent to 100 per cent in coming 3-4 years,” said Garg.
The Department of Telecommunications will also be working towards overcoming the issues and challenges hampering rollout of telecom network in rural area. As part of the Rs 250 billion National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project, the government has set targets to roll out optical fibre cable network in 50,000 panchayats by March 2015, another 100,000 by March 2016 and the remaining 100,000 panchayats by March 2017.
