India:500-m Telephone Connections By 2010

[@ksh@T 20]

India:500-m telephone connections by 2010

Communications and IT ministry to focus more on rural telephony, telecom, IT manufacturing and e-governance this year

NEW DELHI: Communications and IT minister Dayanidhi Maran today projected that India would have 500 million telephone connections by 2010.

Speaking on the occasion of completing two years in office, the minister said the ministry would also take initiative to make the country a hub for IT.

“We have doubled the number of telephone connections in the past two years and today we have 150 million connections. Our target is to achieve 250 million by 2007 and 500 million by 2010,” he said.

Maran said that the government has planned to extend mobile network coverage to 85 per cent of the geographical area of the country by 2007.

The ministry would give top most priority to rural connectivity by covering 41,000 villages through a Village Public Telephone by March 2007. The government has planned to provide about 50 million rural connections with one per three households by year 2007 and about 80 million rural connections by 2010.

Speaking on broadband, Maran said that Human Resources Development minister Arjun Singh has proposed for broadband connectivity to the Secondary and Higher Secondary schools in the country by 2007.

“All public health care centers and Gram Panchayats will also be provided broadband coverage,” the minister said.

Maran said that manufacturing, both in Telecom and IT sector, is crucial for job creation. “Our efforts will be to make India a hub of telecom manufacturing by facilitating more and more telecom specific SEZs. An Export Promotion Council will also be set up for providing necessary platform for export of telecom equipments and services,” Maran added. He said that encouragement for indigenous manufacturing the government intends to make available the handsets at a price level of in the Rs1, 000 by next year.

He said that Union Cabinet has approved the National E-Governance Plan. Department of Information Technology (DIT) would create a ubiquitous platform for integrated delivery of e-government services through Call Centres for all States by 2007.

To give a special thrust for adopting IT technology for availability of various applications in Indian languages and to ensure penetration of IT enabled services to the masses, the DIT has released software tools and fonts in three languages- Tamil, Hindi and Telugu in public domain. Software tools and fonts in two languages Punjabi and Urdu are ready for release. Maran said that 17 other Indian languages are also expected to be covered by 2007.

DIT has also prepared a draft policy proposing a special package of incentives for the state-of-the-art modern technology for setting up semiconductor fabs, ATM, Solar cells, flat panel displays and storage devices. The government would also pay special attention on the 2 and 3 tier cities to ensure equitable growth of this sector and maintain global competitiveness.

IT and ITeS sector is projected to provide employment to about 2.2 million software professionals by 2008.

Edited May 30, 2006 by @ksh@T

[linuxguy 0]

“We have doubled the number of telephone connections in the past two years and today we have 150 million connections. Our target is to achieve 250 million by 2007 and 50 million by 2010,” he said.

Should read 500 million.