NEW DELHI: The government’s ambitious plan to provide broadband internet connectivity across the countryside is likely to be delayed by at least two years because of a sharp escalation in cost, a top executive at the state-run company tasked to implement the project has said.This could jeopardize Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’s ‘Digital India’ initiative as broadband connectivity is the backbone of creating a digitally empowered society where most government services are meant to be delivered through electronic means. Bharat Broadband Network 's ( BBNL ) chairman & managing director Aruna Sundararajan told ET that the rollout of the national broadband network, recently rechristened BharatNet , will not be possible before December 2018 “as the scale of the project and funds requirement have increased more than three-fold”. The original deadline for completion of the network was December 2016.BBNL is the central executing agency of BharatNet, which envisages high-speed broadband connectivity across 2.5 lakh gram panchayats.The cost of the project has shot up to Rs 72,000 crore from the original estimate of Rs 21,000 crore. “The government is yet to approve the revised project cost,” Sundararajan said.She said the national broadband network had managed to reach only 10% or 25,204 of the targeted 2.5 lakh gram panchayats till date. Only Kerala, Chandigarh, Puducherry and a third of Karnataka have been connected so far through fibre optic cables for broadband access.Earlier this year, the telecom department (DoT) had approached the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) for a nine-month extension of the national broadband rollout to December 2016, citing delayed procurement of key devices that will carry voice, data and video signals over the countrywide fibre-optic network."BharatNet program is in sync with Digital India initiative and we plan to deliver 10-15 Mbps broadband speed to every household," the top official added.A total of 58, 400 kilometres of optic fibre has been laid across India till now.In addition, under Digital India plan, 3 lakh schools, 30,000 health centres and 2 lakh government institutions are expected to be connected with high-speed broadband services.BBNL will also be installing 2.5 lakh public Wi-Fi hotspots, which according to Sundararajan, were not there in the original plan. Matters came to a head around May when an expert panel recommended that execution of BharatNet be linked with the Digital India initiative. The objective of syncing the two projects was to facilitate availability of government documents and certificates over cloud for citizens in all 2.5 lakh gram panchayats covering 6 lakh villages and also empower villagers to access their digital identity over a high-speed broadband network.The expert panel included former department of electronics & information technology secretary J Satyanarayana, ex-Nasscom presidents Som Mittal and Kiran Karnik, and Sundararajan, who is also administrator of the Universal Services Obligation Fund ( USOF ), which is the principal funding agency for the national broadband rollout.The USOF is an independent telecom department (DoT) arm that subsidises telecom infrastructure rollouts in rural, remote or commercially unviable areas. It is made up of funds from telecom operators.In this context, Sundararajan said the telecom department and USOF are exploring ways to meet the additional funds requirement. However, this exercise is likely to gain momentum after the Cabinet approves the sharp cost escalation of the national broadband project.The Digital India initiative is heavily dependent on BharatNet as it is targeting 1.75 million broadband connections by 2017 and 600 million by 2020.