Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) will award contracts to the state-owned Telecommunications Consultants India Limited (TCIL) and Pratap Technocrats Private Limited (PTPL) following the ongoing financial evaluation. With the final phase of the ambitious fibre network rollout, the state-owned telco is looking to digitally connect more than 6 lakh villages in a bid to end India’s digital divide by the end of 2028.<\/p>\n
The two emerged as the lowest bidders for the remaining four BharatNet Phase-3 packages.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe financial evaluation is underway, and subject to its satisfactory completion, BSNL expects to issue advance work orders (AWOs) within the next four weeks,\u201d Robert J Ravi, chairman, BSNL told ETTelecom. <\/p>\n
Further, Ravi said that the state-run telecom operator is looking to “complete the BharatNet initiative in the next three years,” finally putting an end to the digital divide in the country. <\/p>\n
BharatNet, a prestigious initiative to connect 6 lakh villages through 2.5 lakh gram panchayats (village blocks), was originally conceived under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) – II regime in 2011, and had missed several deadlines since then. <\/p>\n
Last week, public sector TCIL won the NER-1 (Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya) package, valued at \u20b9 767.97 crore while Gurugram-headquartered PTPL outbid rivals in three packages Rajasthan, Haryana and Assam with a bid value of \u20b92,839.25-crore, \u20b9836.78-crore and \u20b9831.61-crore respectively in a fierce competition. <\/p>\n
Earlier, the packages were scrapped due to techno-legal issues. <\/p>\n
The Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN)-funded mega optic-fibre broadband network programme had seen a cut-throat competition amongst vendors, with participation from domestic telecom and infrastructure companies such as HFCL, Pace Digitek, Dinesh Engineers, Polycab India,GR Infraprojects, STL Networks, and LC Infra Projects.<\/p>\n
In the four packages, as many as 13 companies applied for Assam, 12 for Haryana, 8 for Rajasthan, and 11 for Northeast region (NER-1) which includes Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya.<\/p>\n
Nearly 2.8 lakh village blocks are service-ready currently, with more than 42 lakh route kilometres of optic-fibre cable already deployed. <\/p>\n
In 2023, the Cabinet amended the BharatNet program that aims to create a robust network with a ring topology, integrating 5G technology, and providing fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and Wi-Fi hotspots to as many as 15 million rural households, for digitally delivering multiple citizen-centric services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) will award contracts to the state-owned Telecommunications Consultants India Limited (TCIL) and Pratap Technocrats Private Limited (PTPL) following the ongoing financial evaluation. With the final phase of the ambitious fibre network rollout, the state-owned telco is looking to digitally connect more than 6 lakh villages in a bid to end India’s digital divide by the end of 2028. The two emerged as the lowest bidders for the remaining four BharatNet Phase-3 packages. \u201cThe financial evaluation is underway, and subject to its satisfactory completion, BSNL expects to issue advance work orders (AWOs) within the next four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-984397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecom"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=984397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/984397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=984397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=984397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=984397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}