Do away with broadband levies for villages: Survey

To bridge the rural-urban digital divide, the Economic Survey 2008-09 on Thursday suggested that the government to do away with annual licence fee and other charges on provision of broadband connectivity to the hinterlands.

The survey tabled in Parliament said: "Eliminate revenue share and other telecom charges on provision of broadband connectivity to villages."

The move is likely to encourage service providers to take their broadband services to rural India.

To further increase connectivity, it recommended allowing open access to local loop for broadband provision and designate rural fibre-optic network as a 'public carrier' for provision of telecom connectivity in the rural areas.

Access to local loop means that other players can reach households to provide broadband services by using incumbent BSNL's huge copper network.

An agreement has been signed with BSNL in January 2009 to provide wire-line broadband connectivity to rural and remote areas by leveraging the existing 27,789 rural exchanges and copper wire link networks and by facilitating the service providers in creating broadband infrastructure.

Under the agreement, BSNL would provide 8,61,459 wire-line broadband connections from rural telephone exchanges with subsidy from the universal obligation fund.

The rural broadband connectivity would cover government, institutional users, gram panchayats, higher secondary schools, public health centres and individual users.

The 11th Five-Year plan ending 2012 has targeted to provide broadband for all secondary  schools, all public healthcare centres and gram panchayats.

The government has a target to achieve 40 million Iternet users and 20 million broadband  subscribers by 2010. At present, the broadband subscribers base stood at 5.69 million.