All Revenue Villages will now be covered with Village Public Telephone by finalisation of tenders for uncovered 66,822 villages. With this, all the revenue villages barring thinly populated villages in the country and those located in insurgency-prone areas will be provided with a public telephone facility.
These efforts are the outcome of the finalisation of the recently floated tender wherein six companies, in all, participated. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) took part in the bidding process for all the 12 Service areas where it had one-to-one competition with Bharti Cellular Limited (BCL) in three service areas, namely Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and U.P. (West), comprising of 6221 VPTs. After three rounds of bidding BSNL emerged as the successful bidder for these three service areas apart from the nine service areas where BSNL was the sole service provider. BSNL will be signing the agreements to this effect this week.
As a result of the competition in these three service areas, there was a reduction in the overall subsidy to be given for these VPTs of the order of 15-20%. The total outlay of this activity including the front loaded payment and equated annual installments spread over a period of five years is about Rs. 425 crore.
The USO Fund will very soon release the draft tender calling for provision of Public Tele Info Centres (PTICs) and High Speed Tele Info Centres (HPTICs) providing voice and data in villages having a population of more than 2000.
(Release ID :4794)