Panaji: Goa on Thursday became the first Indian state to have a truly converged wide area network with the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh inaugurating the first phase of the Goa Broadband Network (GBBN) here.<!--more-->

Complimenting the Government of Goa and its partners for the rapid implementation of the project, the Prime Minister said that the project will benefit all sections of the state, and will then truly become a harbinger of change and modernity into the lives of people in the state.

Mentioning the benefits of the ICT, he said that there are a wide range of services that can now be delivered over a telecom link—travel services, healthcare and education.

The Prime Minister further added that many jobs can now be performed long-distance, over a telephone or computer link, which has led to the growth of long distance service delivery models including call-centres, business process outsourcing and knowledge process outsourcing.

He said that the GBBN is a first step in positioning the state for the future and it would hopefully be another success story that will open the doors of the knowledge economy to people of the state.

"Besides providing connectivity at the highest speeds available anywhere in the entire country, the Phase I would connect all state government offices up to the taluka level," Dr Singh said.

He further applauded the project and said that it would be elemental in bridging the digital divide in the state.

The PM added that it will enable a large number of government service functions to be delivered online and will make government processes citizen friendly.

"By the end of next year, as the lines reach each and every home, there would be tremendous service opportunities in new fields such as healthcare, education and employment," he stated.

Mentioning the benefits of the broadband services, he said that Goa would be in a position to provide long distance computer based education and emergency and diagnostic healthcare facilities.

He further said that people would be able to work out of their homes and the state could see an explosion of knowledge based employment in call centres, BPOs and online services.

The Prime Minister said that the entire state could benefit from low cost access to internet telephony and video-conferencing facilities that this project—based on public private partnership (PPP) model—would provide.

As the programme scales up from the 10 Citizen Service Centres today to over 200 by the end of next year, he said that it will generate substantial revenues which will meet a major portion of the costs.

Dr Singh said that this is important in two ways. Firstly, it leverages private investment for public IT infrastructure. Secondly, the importance of generating revenues will be an incentive for developing innovative services which meet the needs of users.

Recalling from the previous experiences, he said that often, it has been the low utility value of user-services that led to the under-utilisation of large government investments in technologies of this type.

The Rs 60 crore Phase 1 of the project involves laying 230 km of optical fibre cable network across the state. The overall cost of the GBBN project is estimated at Rs 125 crore.

"This is the fastest broadband connectivity in the country," the state IT Minister Dayanand Narvekar said adding that it was a New Year's gift from the government to the people of the Goa.

According to the state DIT sources, the second phase of connecting all village Panchayats with the Taluka headquarters through 1 Gbps link will be completed by March 2008.

While the third phase will see the GBBN provide 2 to 10 Mbps connectivity to all households in Goa by end of December 2008, the fourth phase will wireless link regions that do not have any optical fibre cable network.
—iGovernment Bureau