HEADLINES
JOBS
COM:PORT
POLICY POLICE
ARCHIVES

Lay more fibre, Maharashtra tells DoT

At present, fibre has been laid along the five national highways starting from Bombay and going to Nagpur, Nashik, Solapur, Pune and Ratnagiri.

T O D A Y

• The Heel • HCL's Unicentre unit • Maharashtra for fibre • TNT's new services

The government also asked the centre to throw open the ERNET infrastructure for software professionals and not to restrict it to educational institutions.

The optical fibre cable laid by institutions like the Konkan Railway should be opened up for commercial use, it said. Chief Secretary P Subrahmanyam made these demands during a meeting with visiting members of the Prime Minister's Taskforce on Information Technology recently.

Subrahmanyam emphasised the need for a large number of Internet service providers to appropriately cover the whole of Maharashtra, thereby enabling state agencies to take up the work either on their own or through joint ventures.

Internet nodes need to be set up in all the towns where the population was more than 100,000 in the state, he said.

Subrahmanyam said that earth stations should be set up across the state to cover areas around Nagpur, Aurangabad, Nashik, Kolhapur, Solapur and Amravati.

The whole purpose of information technology is to bring about larger, seamless connectivity across the different users and any impediments in respect of policy should be removed, he added.

 Subrahmanyam said the state government would make all efforts to bring the use of information technology within the reach of school children. He said the implementation of projects like Schoolnet would put the best teaching facilities, available only to select few in the developed areas, within reach of children in underdeveloped regions.

A 'wired villages project' is to be implemented at Varna, Nagarin and Kolhapur districts, he said. It would cover 70 villages that propose to use IT to increase the efficiency of existing cooperatives in the field of sugar, paper, dairy, engineering colleges and other educational institutions.

- Compiled from the Indian media

Tell us what you think of this story