BharatNet all set to give fillip to e-commerce services to far flung areas of country: DoT
26 Oct 2017 10:25 PM IST
NEW DELHI: The BharatNet project, which aims to deploy high-speed optical fibre cables across rural areas of the country, has now reached 83,000 gram panchayats, Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, said here on Thursday while speaking at 'i-Bharat 2017' on the theme ICT Elucidations for Unserved and Unsolved, organised by FICCI in association with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
Sundararajan said that by December this year the first phase of BharatNet will be complete. This would provide 100,000 gram panchayats with broadband connectivity by laying underground optic fibre cable lines.
The Department of Telecommunications is aggressively monitoring the prestigious BharatNet initiative that aims to provide Internet connectivity to 2.5 lakh gram panchayats or village blocks by March 2019.
The entire project, when complete, is expected to give a fillip to reaching out e-commerce services, including e governance, education and television services to far flung areas of the country.
The DoT Secretary said that fibreisation was a national imperative and the government, industry and chambers of commerce needed to work in coalition to achieve the objective of doubling the telecom footprint in the country by 2020.
Quoting from internet guru Mary Meeker's 2017 report released in May this year, she said that there are over 355 million monthly active internet users in India, where nearly 109 million smartphones were shipped in 2016.
Nearly 46% of internet users in India consume content in local languages. In the first quarter of 2017, 27 million smartphones were shipped.
Define stakeholders' role in data protection: Trai
NEW DELHI: R S Sharma, Chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), said here on Thursday that TRAI was committed to data protection and was in favor of defining the responsibility of various stakeholders in the value chain to ensure that customers' data is safeguarded. He was speaking at 'i-Bharat 2017' organised by FICCI in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India.
TRAI Chairman said that information privacy, security and data ownership, needed to be defined. He added that TRAI followed the process of consultations and formulated policies or issued any mandate.
Only after seeking views and conducting open houses with industry and relevant stakeholders, TRAI would finalize any policy going forward as well. He added that several consultation papers were out in the public domain for recommendations and suggestions.
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