Budget 2019: BharatNet to be speeded up

The Centre’s ambitious BharatNet program is being speeded up with moves afoot to target internet availability in every panchayat or ‘village block in the country,’ finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Friday, in the course of her Budget2019 speech.

The FM said the government would dip into the Universal Services Obligation Fund (USOF) corpus to enable BharatNet to boost rural broadband penetration through the public, private partnership (PPP) model to bridge the digital divide.