New Delhi, May 30 : Very soon, every village in the country will have an internet equipped service centre to ensure rural access to various online services like railway reservation and weather information for farmers.
The information technology department is working on a plan to have 2.5 lakh such centres across the country - one in every panchayat - by 2012.
While this is an extension of the original plan to have one lakh telecentres - one each at the block level - the department is banking on the recently unveiled National Broadband Policy to provide access to high speed connectivity.
Additional secretary, IT, Shankar Agarwal said, "The existing centres have internet facility but the speed is not very high, just about 256 kbps.
We are hoping that when the national broadband policy comes into force, this will increase to 2 mbps so that the service is more efficient and even video content can be sent.
We have about 6 lakh villages in the country, so the new target will mean that there will be one telecentre for every 2.5 villages."
At present, there are about 94,000 telecentres in the country, mostly at the block level. Each centre has a computer, a scanner, a printer and technical staff to help villagers with their work.
The idea, Agarwal said, is to have a cyber cafe like infrastructure in place for access of people in the rural areas. Private initiatives did not quite take off because of the uncertain nature of the business model which is when government decided to pitch in, he added.
While the department is confident of meeting the 2012 deadline for the panchayat level centres, upgrade of internet service is a very important aspect of the plan as without it the plan to use this in a big way for educational purposes may not be very successful. "Transfer of video content is essential to use the centres as distance learning hub," Agarwal said.
The speed increase as envisaged in the broadband policy would entail laying of fibre cables which could mean possible land issues. The cables would need to be laid and there could be opposition from panchayats or individual farm owners about the digging work that would be essential for this.
The 2 mbps internet speed plan in fact is a take-off from the government's own State Wide Area Network (SWAN) project which is in place for intra-government connectivity under which every block level government office in the country across 27 states is connected.
The states/UTs that are not a part of the initiative now include Goa, Andamans, Daman and Diu, Mizoram and Meghalaya. Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan started late but are now catching up.
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