In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Satyendra Gupta, Executive Director, Aksh Optifibre shares his views on the government's Digital India plans. Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview. Q: What do you make of this Digital India mission. It impacts you directly, it is ambitious to say the least. The Prime Minister is saying that his dream is that civilisations are actually going to come up and around these optical fibres. Is all of this going to be possible? Are we going to see their dream go through?
Gupta: I am very thankful for Modiji and his team for this Digital India project. This has been involved to bridge the digital divide and involved in all the three key areas of the Digital India which is the digital infrastructure, governance and service on demand and digital empowerment. So, all these three areas which Modiji is already looking at will be involved and help in developing of the country. Q: But the national optic fiber network is going slow. We have already seen the deadline being pushed once till December 2016. Reports are suggesting that we are currently laying fiber networks 500 kilometres per month and the pace that is actually required is a whopping 30,000 kilometres per month. That makes one wonder that is this a realistic dream. Let us not forget we are not just targeting to lay these optical fibres, the Prime Minister is now talking about civilisations coming up along these along these fibre networks.
Gupta: Every project - such a large project has initial problems which are there but the monitoring which is being done by the PMO office directly I am pretty sure that that will take the project into its right stream and once the project has already been taken on-stream we hope that the target will definitely be met with the full co-ordination and the vision for the government.
Q: 35 percent is what we are talking about. China has 98 percent broadband connectivity. How long will it take us to even get close to that kind of a penetration?
Gupta: The way India is already growing it will not take more than three to four years to get to the connectivity. India growth over the last four years has been unprecedented over about eight to ten percent of the broadband itself.
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