New Delhi: Increasing telecom infrastructure at the village level and taking rural teledensity to 100 per cent will be the prime focus areas for Telecom Secretary Rakesh Garg who took the charge on Thursday.
"It will be prime objective to take broadband connectivity to village level, that is to increase telecom infrastructure. Second priority is take rural telecom penetration from 44 per cent to 100 per cent in coming 3-4 years," Garg said.
He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad have assigned this task to the Department of Telecom and his main focus will be to fulfil their vision.
The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet approved the appointment of Garg, UP Cadre IAS, on July 12 in place of MF Farooqui who superannuated on June 30. Garg said that DoT will overcome all hurdles in way of increasing telecom services in rural area.
"Consumers want to have telecom connectivity in every part of the country. They do not want to stay away from phone. Like it is said that every village should have road, power... similarly, in every village not only telephone but broadband connectivity should also reach," he said.
Telephone connectivity is now no longer limited to voice but people want access to data (Internet), he added. "We will look at and resolve all issues hampering increase of rural telecom penetration," Garg said.
Government has set target to roll-out optical fibre network in 50,000 panchayats by March 2015, another one lakh by March 2016 and all the 2.5 lakh by March 2017. The Cabinet has already approved Rs 20,000 crore for this project in October 2011.
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