Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is a partner in the Government of India’s ambitious ‘Digital India’ programme, which aims to transform India into a digitally empowered society.
BSNL is observing ‘Digital India Week’ in all its operational territories, covering far-flung areas of the country. Various activities are going to be organised on an all-India basis throughout BSNL to commemorate this first-of-its-kind programme in India.
BSNL is performing its responsibility by helping bridging the digital gap in our society for its social, educational and economical upliftment.
We are organising trips of schoolchildren to telephone exchanges and giving them presentations on how telecom can transform our lives digitally.
BSNL will also organise ‘melas’ to disseminate information about various programmes initiated recently, like ‘Free All India Roaming’, ‘Free Night Calling’ from landline etc.
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister will be inaugurating more than 50 Wi-Fi hotspots and an equal number of next-generation network (NGN) exchanges. This will boost our plans of expansion and contribution to ‘Digital India’.
Special camps are also going to be organised during the week where we will educate common people on online recharge of mobile, payment of utility bills and Internet banking usage.
As part of Digital India, high-speed Internet services will be made available to all Gram Panchayats and BSNL is a proud partner in this project with the National Optical Fiber Network (NOFN).
BSNL is one of the largest broadband service providers and our urban and rural exchanges are equipped with broadband facilities covering 100 per cent and 90 per cent, respectively. We are the first broadband operator to offer minimum 512 kbps speed to both urban and rural customers. We are also offering broadband speed of up to 100 Mbps.
We are also coming up with mobile wallet, mGovernance, machine-to-machine technology like smart meters and Internet data centres. The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation is also using our cloud based services and the Election Commission is tapping our computing capacities with the six data centres that we have.
These are some activities that we are undertaking for the Digital India project.
The writer is Chairman and Managing Director of BSNL