Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) has taken following steps for providing broadband services in rural areas:

i. The Indian Telegraph Rules have been amended, and stream IV has been added under the title “Provision of broadband connectivity to villages in a phased manner” to bring provisioning of broadband connectivity to the rural areas under the purview of the USOF.

ii. For providing broadband connections in rural areas, including Gram Panchayats, USOF has signed an Agreement with BSNL on January 20, 2009 under the Rural Wireline Broadband Scheme to provide wire-line broadband connectivity to rural & remote areas by leveraging the existing rural exchanges infrastructure and copper wire-line network. The speed of each of the broadband connections shall be at least 512 kbps always on.

Under this scheme, BSNL will provide 8,88,832 wire-line Broadband connections to individual users and Government Institutions and will set up 28,672 Kiosks over a period of 5-years, i.e., by 2014. The subsidy disbursement is for (i) broadband connections, Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), Computer/Computing devices (ii) setting up of Kiosks for public access to broadband services. The estimated subsidy outflow is Rs. 1500 crore in 5 years time that includes subsidy for 9 lakh broadband connections, CPEs, computers/computing devices and Kiosks. As on 31 January 2010, 106070 broadband connections have been provided and 4 kiosks have been set up in the rural and remote areas

Telecom services in rural areas

The Government has taken various measures to provide telecom facilities in rural areas of the country. As a result, the rural teledensity has become 21.19% as on December, 2009 against the target of 4% teledensity in rural areas by 2010. To spread the reach of telecom connectivity, more than 5.6 lakh villages have been provided with Village Public Telephones (VPTs) in the country covering more than 95% of the villages.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was established with the objective to regulate the telecommunication services, to protect the interest of service providers and consumers of the telecom sector, to promote and ensure orderly growth of the telecom and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. TRAI has been able to achieve the above objectives as evident from below:

The supportive regulatory environment created by TRAI through issue of various regulations, directions and orders has contributed significantly in the growth of telecom services in terms of increase in the number of service providers, consumer base and vast network of the telecom services in the country. These measures have resulted in overall benefits to the consumer in terms of choice of services, affordable tariff of telecom services and better quality of services.

This information was given by the Minister of State for Communications & Information Technology, Shri Gurudas Kamat in written reply to a question in Lok Sabha today