The government’s ambitious plan to provide seamless connectivity across the country’s north-eastern region has made little headway despite the Union Cabinet approving a comprehensive plan more than three years back.
Official sources said that budgetary estimate for the plan that would have provided a stable telecom network in the north-east has gone up from the originally-envisaged ₹5,300 crore to over ₹8,000 crore. However, not even one project has been completed so far.
The states that would be included as part of the project are Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. The projects are critical in nature as they require work in the border areas and strategically-sensitive zones. According to the originally-envisaged plan, a total of 8,621 villages (and the national highway region around them) had to be provided mobile coverage through the project that received approval from the Cabinet in September 2014.
BSNL had called for tender in April 2016, and had awarded work to two companies Vihaan Networks (VNL) and HFCL in April last year under the preference to domestically-manufactured telecom products policy. However, the telecom department is yet to give final orders to award the work here.
Sinha recently stated that Projects are running behind schedule due to a variety of reasons, which include inadequacy of the agencies that are implementing the projects; hindrances due to various developmental activities like expansion of national highways; hilly terrain and remote and inaccessible areas. Law and order related issues are another trouble area for the region.