Senior vice president of the Mahila Congress in Uttarakhand and head of the Manorama Dobriyal Sharma Memorial Foundation, Asha Sharma submitted a memorandum decorated with flowers addressed to the union telecom minister at the office of the director of Bharat Sanchar Nigam limited (BSNl).
The decorated memorandum elicits the attention to an earlier memorandum submitted on July 10 to raise the issue of the problems being faced in telecom connectivity and facilitation of broadband service in 3,000 Gram Panchayats in the state. Despite this, the works related to the 47 base trans-receiver station (BTS) in the said villages have remained stuck.
The memorandum submitted on Tuesday states that on the one hand the prime minister Narendra Modi talks of going cashless whereas on the other hand there are three thousand villages in Uttarakhand where there is no connectivity.
The memo states that despite the various claims being made by more than one dozen central ministers including the union telecom minister, the state of Uttarakhand continues to face the problem of connectivity. Sharma has also elicited the focus of the union minister of alleged apathy being shown towards the state of Uttarakhand in the prime minister’s Digital India programme.
She has further sought the minister’s intervention to tackle the “absence of broadband and 3G connectivity is more than 50 per cent of the state’s Gram Panchayats”. Referring to the work on 47 base trans-receiver stations in border areas being stuck, Sharma averred that the State Government had done considerable work under the Digital India programme to set up command service centres in Gram Panchayats but due to the absence of broadband service, these Gram Panchayats are not being able to access the benefits of online citizen services provided by the government.
She further demanded that mobile phone network connectivity be ensured in the border regions, setting up of the 47 BTSs, broadband and 3G network connectivity in addition to which the private telecom companies should also be told to strengthen their network and services in the state.