Government has earmarked Rs 20,000 crore for NOFN project to connect all 2.5 lakh village panchayats by December 2016 with broadband speed of 100 mbps at each panchayat level.

New Delhi: Village panchayats connected with the National Optical Fibre Network are getting broadband speed of only 50 mbps, which is half of what the government has committed under the project, says a study.

"The NOFN promises bandwidth of 100 mbps. However, during our study, we found that the average speed is 50 mbps," said a Digital Empowerment Foundation report released today at Convergence India 2015.

Government has earmarked Rs 20,000 crore for NOFN project to connect all 2.5 lakh village panchayats by December 2016 with broadband speed of 100 mbps at each panchayat level.

DEF conducted its study in three blocks -- Arian in Ajmer district (Rajasthan), Parvada in Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Panisagar in North Tripura district (Tripura), that were covered by Bharat Broadband Network Limited under its pilot project.

The three blocks cover 58 village panchayats.

DEF said that BBNL, the special purpose vehicle managing NOFN, claimed that the pilot phase has been completed and covered all panchayats under the three block.

It found that even in pilot phase NOFN hard line has been reached to 3 blocks but not completely covered village panchayats under them.

"Just 67 percent had the hard line connection to the NOFN and 20.5 percent have no connection to the NOFN," the report said.

BSNL has been assigned task to cover 75 percent of village panchayats and 15 percent each to PowerGrid and RailTel.

PTI