Dear All, India’s first hi-speed rural broadband network (national optical fibre network, NOFN) under the Digital India Programme has been commissioned in Idukki district of Kerala. Through this, Idukki with a large tribal and rural population becomes the first district in the country to have all its gram panchayats connected through NOFN. NOFN is the largest rural connectivity project of its kind in the world. It seeks to link each of the 2.5 lakh grama panchayats of India through broadband optical fibre network. It is is expected to facilitate broadband connectivity to over 600 million rural citizens of the country over its completion. It will enable the grama panchayats to have 100 Mbps of bandwidth, thereby facilitating the delivery of various e-Services and applications including e-health, e-education, e-governance and e-commerce in the future. In the first phase, NOFN shall be extended to cover 50,000 grama panchayats and the remaining 2 lakh is expected to be covered in a phased manner by 2016. Read the full story at: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/idukki-gets-first-hig... regards -- Saji S. Nair Assistant Librarian Library & Information Services Division Regional Cancer Centre Medical College Campus Trivandrum - 695011 Kerala, INDIA ----------------------------------------------------------- 91 471 2522225 (O) 91 471 2394252 (R) 09446014130 (Mob) Email: saji@rcctvm.org -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.