Idukki district of Kerala becomes India’s first district with rural broadband network

Idukki district of Kerala has become first district in India to have high speed Rural Broadband Network i.e. National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) Internet connectivity.

Union Minister of Information Technology and Communications Ravi Shankar Prasad commissioned this Hi-speed rural broadband network under the governments flagship Digital India programme.

In Idukki, 8 block offices and 52 village panchayats out of 53 will benefit from this project.

Facts about National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN):

• NOFN is the largest rural connectivity project of its kind in the world.

• It aims to transform the country into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.

• It seeks to link each of the 2.5 lakh village panchayats in the country spread over 6600 blocks and 631 districts through broadband optical fibre network in order to provide a minimum bandwidth of 100 Mbps.

• On its completion, NOFN is expected to facilitate Broadband connectivity to over 600 million rural citizens of the country.

• NOFN, is being funded by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), Department of Telecom, Ministry of Communications & IT.

• It will offer people with friendly services like e-governance, e-health, e-education, e-banking, public internet access etc. It will also enable delivery of various government services such as local planning, management, monitoring and payments of Government schemes at panchayat level.

Thus it will help to provide non-discriminatory telecom infrastructure, in order to bridge the gap of digital divide in rural internet access.