Centre to invite private firms to lay optic cables for 50K gram panchayats

The bids will be invited towards the end of February.

In order to fast track the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project, the Central government is planning to invite the private sector to lay down the fibre optic cables to cover 50,000 gram panchayats, located in Punjab, Haryana, UP, Rajasthan, Bihar and Jharkhand in the next round of the project. The bids will be invited towards the end of February.

This comes after telecom regulator TRAI issued a consultation paper last September, flagging the matter of awarding turnkey contracts in NOFN to private players to boost the speed of execution.

“We will be calling the bids from the private sector to lay the cables for the next round of the project. This will probably happen by the end of this February. This has not happened so far in NOFN,” said Aruna Sundararajan, CMD, Bharat Broadband Network (BBNL), a government arm created to manage the NOFN.

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A spokesperson for BBNL added that it has not yet been decided whether the contract will be awarded to private players on a turnkey basis, or if they will be restricted to laying down the cables only.

According to Sundararajan, the electronics equipment for the project, in its entirety, is being manufactured indigenously by a company based out of Bangalore. “The designing has been done by CDOT and it is entirely made in India,” she said.

The PMO has set an ambitious deadline for the project in the wake of the Prime Minister’s ‘Digital India’ vision, with ministry officials claiming that it is unlikely that they will get more time beyond 2016. The DoT had previously written to the PMO requesting a 9 month deadline extension till December 2016, to which they have so far received no response.

“So far, the maximum amount of cable laid down in a year has been for about 40000 km. Now we are targeting about 7 lakh km in two years time,” a DoT official said. He added that going forth, the states could be given freedom to directly monitor projects in addition to handling the bidding process themselves, which will give them a say in choosing the executing agency that will work in their area.