As per a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), the common service centre (CSC) is particularly responsible for the poorly executed and poor quality services offered by infrastructure laid under the BharatNet project.
The CAG said that despite a huge payment to CSC, it was not able to maintain all the cable and other infrastructure in various circles, leading to poor quality service at the village or gram panchayat level.
A payment of Rs 3.86 billion and Rs 1.16 billion was made to the CSC under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under the new arrangement.
The payment is a part of a tripartite agreement between the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL) and CSC that took place in July 2019 and was approved by the Digital Communication Commission (DCC) in September 2020.
The national auditor also said that the USOF had not finalised any tool or format to effectively monitor the installation of access points till as late as December 2020, and was only relying on data provided by CSC.
According to the findings, the USOF could not impose a penalty on CSC for delays in completing BharatNet work.
As mandated, CSC failed to provide 10 Mbps of internet speed through fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections to state institutions such as hospitals, schools and police stations.
As a result, the CAG recommended that Bharat Broadband Network should enforce CSC’s responsibility to maintain infrastructure as per the agreement, and added that non-conducting of physical inspections led to inadequate monitoring of the national optic fibre network and quality of service.
The national auditor cited the example of Madhya Pradesh, where only 3 per cent or 372 village blocks were inspected out of 12,700, and Gujarat where only three inspections were completed.
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