Government Canceled bid for Rs 19,000 for Crore rural broadband connection due to lack of contractors
Government suspends a tender to provide rural broadband connection due to lack of contractors
New Delhi:
State-owned Bharat Broadband Nigam Limited (BBNL) has canceled a tender of Rs 19,000 that had been floated to connect villages across 16 states to a fiber-based high-speed broadband network, after the lack of participation of qualified contractors.
The project was approved last June to deploy the BharatNet fiber optic network in 16 states under a public-private partnership model at a total cost of Rs 29,430 crore.
The Government has approved a viability differential fund of Rs 19,041 crore for the project to connect 3,61 lakh villages across 16 states.
The project is divided into nine bidding packages and the bidding packages for each package are assigned separately.
For each of the nine tenders, BBNL said on 8 February that the tender of the respective package “with all of its bids hereby abandoned as a result of any non-participation in “.
An e-mail query was sent to BBNL with no response.
However, an official source said that with the participation of several firms, bids were evaluated; but the participants are not eligible.
“The tender will be re-floated once it receives a response from the industry. The government is committed to connecting the villages with broadband as soon as possible,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The government opted for a public-private partnership after state-owned companies had problems expediting projects and missed several deadlines.
The BharatNet project was approved in 2011 as the National Fiber Optic Network with the aim of connecting all 2.5 lakh panchayats to the fiber optic network by 2013.
The project has now been extended to 2025.
According to official data, more than 1,69 thousand village panchayats have been made available for broadband services according to BharatNet as of December 31, 2021.
