Editorial – March 2015

Just what is the role of BBNL? Is it a Special Purpose Vehicle for NOFN implementation or is it going to be a defacto PSU. BBNL has 24 senior officers and has gone into a hiring spree, young engineers its recruitment ad says who will have a “long term career in company in OFC laying Broadband & Transmission Network.”

After Aruna Sundararajan took over, BBNL has been allocated the installation work for 50,000 GPs (out of 2.5 lakh GPs) and it is in the process of inviting mega bids. Three PSUs, BSNL (with the biggest share of work), RailTel and PowerGrid also are engaged in the same project.

We all knew that BBNL is an SPV that will direct the whole NOFN effort, i.e the work of the three PSUs, now it has carved out its own territory. Not just this, the labyrinth of committee systems flourishes to advice on achieving targets. One Expert committee tasked with this mandate has appointed another to do the same task. Voila!

In the technology sector, what we call the ICT4D (ICT for Development) we have seen good policies being decisively defeated because of bad managers. Let us refer our readers back to the CSC (Common Service Centre) project, and its promised themes. Every Village a knowledge Centre, one CSC for every six villages delivering all required e-services and what not. It is a project that adorns Ms Sundararajan’s CV.

We were promised robust work in four areas – agriculture, education, health (remote diagnostic) and the last one was financial inclusion. And of course all can be ranked last in terms of performance. We were promised 1 lakh village entrepreneurs and there are only few village-IT businesses as subsidiary operations to the main kirana business. Railway ticketing, the most widely demanded access service is in the hands of ‘agents’, a term for touts in villages. We were promised a national branding strategy (Central govt, state govt & the private operator) for G2C services and of course we got none.

There are messy developments both on the side of physical infrastructure and an equally messy situation on the front of services that goes by the imaginative acronym called GUN – Government User Network.

For Ache Din to happen, NOFN project is a necessity. We will watch this project implementation very closely.