Bharat Broadband Nigam Ltd, a state-owned company, has cancelled a tender worth Rs 19000 crore that was floated for connecting villages across 16 states with optical fibre-based high-speed broadband networks, due to a lack of participation from eligible bidders.
Under a public-private partnership model, the Rs 29,430 crore cost of deploying an optical fibre network in 16 states under BharatNet was approved in June last year. A viability gap fund of Rs 19,041 crore was approved by the Centre for the project aiming to connect more than 3.61 lakh villages across 16 states. The project was divided into nine packages, and tenders for each package were solicited separately.
A BBNL official told PTI that for each of the nine tenders, the package tender ‘with all its previous corrigenda is hereby cancelled due to non-participation by any bidder’. An e-mail query sent to BBNL yielded no response. However, an official source said there was participation from some firms; bids were evaluated, but the participants failed to qualify.
‘The tender will be floated again after taking feedback from the industry. The government is committed to connecting villages with broadband at the earliest,’ the source, who did not wish to be named, said. Public-private partnerships were selected after state-owned firms missed several deadlines and experienced delays in completing the projects.
In 2011, the BharatNet project was approved as the National Optical Fibre Network with a goal of connecting all 2.5 lakh panchayats to the network by 2013. Now, the project has been extended until 2025. Over 1.69 lakh village panchayats have been made eligible for broadband connections through BharatNet as of December 31, 2021, according to official figures.
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