The two- day review of the National Optical Fibre (NOFN) Project, which is a part of the Digital India initiative of the Union Government, concluded in Dehradun on Saturday. An important decision taken at the meeting is that Uttarakhand will appoint nodal officers in each block for coordination from state side for implementation of NOFN. Besides, all the dilapidated Gram Panchayat Bhawans, will be repaired to facilitate installation of NOFN equipment by the state government and AC power connections will be provided expeditiously by state government in all the pending Gram Panchayat Bhavans for making the equipment operational.
Pending Right of Way (ROW) cases will be expedited for completion of optical fibre cable(OFC) laying by the state government and BSNl would expedite laying of OFC cable and testing in all the non covered Gram Panchayats in Uttarakhand. The meeting was led by Padma Iyer Kaul, deputy director general, the nodal officer, appointed by Department of Teleocom (DOT) headquarters visited Dehradun. With the help of the Office of Controller Communication Accounts (CCA), DoT Uttarakhand, meetings were held with all the stake holders viz. chief secretary, Uttarakhand (state government), chief general manager (CGM), BSNl and general manager (GM), Bharat Broadband Nigam limited to expedite the implementation of NOFN Project and to iron out bottlenecks.
Haridwar district would be the priority district as 84 percent GPs have been connected by OFC . BSNl & BBNl will take necessary action to connect all the 316 Gram Panchayats (GP) in Haridwar by December, 2016. Till date, 225 GPs out of 316 have been integrated (lit), and 268 GPs out of 316 have been connected with OFC. In addition, six block offices are to be connected. On November 4, a team led by Ashish Joshi, controller, Uttarakhand inspected Gajawali Gram Panchayat (GP), Badrabad block. Gajawali is fully lit GP. The team was accompanied by nodal officer DOT HQ Satish Kumar, joint controller, Uttarakhand and Vijay Kumar, GM BBNl. Spot checking of installed equipment was done and wi-fi availability checked. It was followed by a review meeting in Gajawali GP on the issues related to implementation of NOFN project in Hardwar district. Chief development officer, district panchayati officer of Hardwar district and officials of customer service centre(CSC) from the state government were present.
NOFN is intended as a transport network to enforce Digital India through delivery of utilities for Panchayats through panchayat management - gram sabha meetings, village records, updating of citizen databases, effective performance monitoring of panchayats, community participation and the like.