800 panchayats in West Bengal circle to get broadband this year

BSNL West Bengal Telecom Circle will cover over 800 gram panchayats under the BharatNet project by this year for high-speed broadband connectivity, an official said on Saturday.

"Cables have already been laid in 825 gram panchayats across West Bengal and Sikkim, while end-fibre testing has been concluded in 310 gram panchayats," BSNL Chief General Manager, West Bengal Telecom Circle, Rabindra Nath Jha, announced here.

Work under BharatNet, a major part of Centre's Digital India project, is progressing very fast, he said. The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project was conceived in 2011 to connect all panchayats of the country.

The NDA government changed its name to BharatNet.  BSNL will connect 3,515 gram panchayats under 362 blocks in West Bengal Telecom Circle to the network, he said.

To a question, Jha said BSNL services were getting affected due to damage to their infrastructure because of construction works of national highways, state highways and civic infrastructure development.

"This has happened due to lack of proper coordination among various agencies in the state," he added. The public sector company is mulling using network along railway tracks and transmission lines to cope with this problem and avoid disruptions.

Jha said West Bengal Telecom Circle is going to concentrate on wide penetration of their mobile service in rural areas so as to bridge the rural-urban divide and empower more citizens through information and communication technology (ICT).

The PSU has also come up with various data plans to provide Internet connectivity at a lower rate in comparison to other service providers, he said.

Stating that there is tremendous scope of growth for BSNL in rural areas, the chief general manager said, "BSNL is going to extend 4G data services to Siliguri, Durgapur, Asansol, Kharagpur and Gangtok shortly." "We have recently installed a new Intelligent Network platform at an investment of Rs 43 crore and will launch Wi-Fi based broadband services at various hotspots like Gangasagar and Tarakeshwar temple," Jha said.

"BSNL is the only agency to have set up 96 base transceiver stations in the three Left wing extremism hit districts of Purulia, Bankura and West Medinipur, known as Jangalmahal," Jha added.