India: 97,392 villages go online
Bharat Nirman II, the flagship programme of the GoI, envisages to provide broadband connectivity to all village panchayats of India. 97,392 villages have already benefited from it.
Connectivity to Gram Panchayats through broadband network is included as a component in the Bharat Nirman II Programme, Union Minister for Rural Development and Panchayati Raj CP Joshi informed.
As on September 2010, a total of 97,392 village Panchayats have been broadband enabled. Under Bharat Nirman II Programme, the government has envisaged to provide broadband connectivity to all village Panchayats. Some States are using computers in functioning of Panchayats including for digitising records and files.
For implementation of e-Governance in Panchayats, Ministry of Panchayati Raj (MoPR) has formulated “e-Panchayat Mission Mode Project (MMP)”.
Under this MMP, reports on (1) Information and Service Needs Assessment (2) Business Process Re-engineering and (3) Detailed Project Reports for each State/UT (except Delhi) have been prepared and sent to respective States/UTs for operationalising.
For this MMP, MoPR has been allocated Rs.5.5 crore in 2008-09; Rs.22.07 crore in 2009-10 and Rs.24 crore in 2010-11. From this amount, development of software applications to automate core functions of Panchayats has also been taken up.
