🏛 Polity & GovernanceMAINS · GS2.15 · GS3.9

Amended BharatNet rollout signed for Andhra Pradesh

Digital Bharat Nidhi inks a state-led agreement to extend rural broadband across Andhra Pradesh under the Amended BharatNet Programme.

What happened

On 13 May 2026, at Sanchar Bhawan in New Delhi, an implementation agreement was signed for the Amended BharatNet Programme (ABP) in Andhra Pradesh under the State-led model.
Five parties signed: Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN) under the Department of Telecommunications, the Government of Andhra Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh BharatNet Infrastructure Limited (APBIL), BSNL, and Andhra Pradesh State FiberNet Limited (APSFL).
₹2,432 crore of financial support was approved for the rollout in the State.
The agreement covers 13,426 Gram Panchayats and promises on-demand connectivity to 3,942 villages.
It is expected to enable more than 5 lakh rural home fibre connections for e-governance, online education, tele-medicine and digital payments.
The signing operationalises, for one State, a national programme the Union Cabinet had approved on 4 August 2023.

Background & context

BharatNet is India's flagship rural-broadband project, the world's largest rural optical-fibre programme by ambition. It was conceived to take high-speed internet to every Gram Panchayat (GP) — the lowest tier of Panchayati Raj — so that the "last mile" of digital connectivity reaches the village rather than stopping at the district town. The original avatar was launched in 2011 as the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) and re-branded BharatNet in 2015, with phased targets to link roughly 2.5 lakh Gram Panchayats by laying fibre from the block level downward.

The programme repeatedly slipped against its own deadlines, and the model of who lays and maintains the fibre kept being revised. The Amended BharatNet Programme (ABP) is the response to that learning. The Union Cabinet cleared it on 4 August 2023 to upgrade, consolidate and expand BharatNet — providing broadband to all Gram Panchayats and, crucially, to villages on demand, rather than only to the GP headquarters. A signature design change is the move from a linear (point-to-point) topology to a ring topology on the older Phase-I network, so that a single fibre cut no longer blacks out everything downstream — a resilience upgrade that matters for services like tele-medicine that cannot tolerate outages.

The Andhra Pradesh agreement is significant because it adopts the State-led implementation model, under which a State Special Purpose Vehicle (here APBIL and the existing APSFL) executes and operates the network, with DBN providing the funding and BSNL as a central partner. This is the alternative to the centrally-driven model and lets a State that already has fibre assets — Andhra Pradesh built APSFL years ago as one of India's earliest State fibre grids — plug them into the national programme instead of duplicating them.

It helps to see where the money comes from, because that is where most Prelims confusion lives. The funding body, Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN), is simply the new name of the old Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF). USOF was created to solve a market failure: private telecom operators have little commercial incentive to lay infrastructure in thin, remote rural markets, so a slice of the industry's own revenue is pooled and re-directed to fund exactly that uncommercial connectivity. Operators pay a Universal Service Levy — a percentage of their adjusted gross revenue — which is credited to the Consolidated Fund of India; appropriations are then made from it for rural and remote-area projects. The fund existed from 2002 under the Indian Telegraph (Amendment) Act, 2003. The Telecommunications Act, 2023 — the statute that replaced the colonial-era Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 and the Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933 — re-designated it as Digital Bharat Nidhi and broadened its purposes beyond pure access to include research, pilot projects and the introduction of next-generation services. So the chain of administration runs: Ministry of Communications → Department of Telecommunications (DoT) → Digital Bharat Nidhi (an attached office) → the State SPV that executes BharatNet on the ground.

How does this compare to a peer programme? The closest sibling is the 4G Saturation project, also funded by DBN, which fills mobile-coverage gaps by erecting towers in villages that still have no signal. The two are complementary, not interchangeable: 4G Saturation delivers wireless mobile coverage to uncovered habitations, whereas BharatNet lays physical optical fibre to the Gram Panchayat and now to homes — the high-capacity, low-latency backbone that wireless coverage cannot match for services like high-definition tele-medicine or bulk e-governance data. A student who can separate "fibre-to-the-GP (BharatNet)" from "mobile-tower-to-the-village (4G Saturation)," both drawing on the same Digital Bharat Nidhi corpus, has the distinction that statement-based questions reward.

For Prelims

Programme: Amended BharatNet Programme (ABP) — Cabinet-approved 4 August 2023; upgrades, consolidates and expands the earlier BharatNet.
Lineage: National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN), 2011 → renamed BharatNet, 2015 → Amended BharatNet Programme, 2023. Same programme, three names.
Goal: broadband to every Gram Panchayat and to villages on demand — connectivity to the GP, not merely to the block or district.
Funding vehicle: Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN) — the renamed Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).
USOF history: established under the Indian Telegraph (Amendment) Act, 2003, with effect from 1 April 2002; it is financed by a levy (the Universal Service Levy) on telecom operators' adjusted gross revenue, paid into the Consolidated Fund of India and then drawn for rural/remote connectivity.
Renaming: USOF was re-designated Digital Bharat Nidhi under The Telecommunications Act, 2023; DBN is an attached office of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Ministry of Communications.
DBN's mandate beyond BharatNet: 4G Saturation, mobile service in Aspirational Districts, Left-Wing Extremism (LWE) areas, Himalayan and Border areas, Islands and the North-Eastern region.
Andhra Pradesh deal — the numbers: ₹2,432 crore · 13,426 Gram Panchayats (1,692 Phase-I GPs upgraded from linear to ring topology + 11,254 Phase-II GPs + 480 newly created) · 3,942 villages on demand · >5 lakh rural home fibre connections.
Signatories (five): DBN (DoT) · Government of Andhra Pradesh · APBIL · BSNL · APSFL.
Model: the State-led model (State SPV executes and operates; DBN funds) — as distinct from the centrally-driven model.

For UPSC: Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN) is the renamed USOF, re-designated under the Telecommunications Act, 2023; it funds BharatNet — the Gram-Panchayat optical-fibre broadband programme whose Amended version the Cabinet approved on 4 August 2023.

What it is NOT. ABP is not a brand-new scheme launched in 2023 — it is the amended continuation of BharatNet (itself the renamed NOFN of 2011). Digital Bharat Nidhi is not a new fund created by the Telecommunications Act — it is the renamed USOF, which has existed since 2002; only the name and the governing statute changed. DBN is an attached office of DoT, not a statutory regulator — it does not license operators or fix tariffs (that is TRAI's and DoT's domain). BharatNet connects Gram Panchayats and villages; it is not a scheme limited to district headquarters or to providing free smartphones. The State-led model does not mean the State funds it — funding still flows from DBN; the State executes and operates.

The set it belongs to — DBN/USOF-funded connectivity programmes (for "how many of these" questions): BharatNet (Gram Panchayat fibre) · 4G Saturation (mobile towers in uncovered villages) · mobile connectivity in Aspirational Districts · LWE-area connectivity · Himalayan, Border, Island and North-Eastern connectivity schemes. All are financed from the same Digital Bharat Nidhi corpus.

Why it matters

The problem ABP attacks is the rural half of India's digital divide: data and services are cheap in cities, but a Gram Panchayat without a fibre backbone cannot host a reliable e-governance counter, a tele-medicine link to a district hospital, or a school's online class. BharatNet's earlier slippage meant that even where fibre reached the GP office, the "last mile" to homes, and resilience against cable cuts, were missing. The Amended programme answers both — fibre to homes (the >5 lakh connections target in Andhra Pradesh alone) and ring topology so the network survives a single break.

The State-led model is the other half of the significance. By routing implementation through a State SPV that already owns fibre, the programme converts a State's existing investment into part of the national grid, shortens the build, and gives the State operational ownership of maintenance — the stage at which BharatNet historically failed. Andhra Pradesh, an early mover on State fibre through APSFL, is a natural test of whether cooperative and competitive federalism can deliver public digital infrastructure faster than a purely Centre-run rollout. The agreement also sits inside the larger Digital India and "broadband-for-all" ambitions, and the renaming of USOF as Digital Bharat Nidhi under the Telecommunications Act, 2023 signals that the same revenue stream now formally underwrites this next, deeper push into village homes.

For Mains

Exemplification

The Andhra Pradesh ABP agreement is a concrete example of the State-led, cooperative-federal delivery of digital public infrastructure — usable wherever an answer needs a live instance of Centre–State collaboration extending broadband to the last village.

Substantiation

Hard data points for a digital-divide or rural-infrastructure answer: ₹2,432 crore, 13,426 Gram Panchayats, 3,942 on-demand villages, >5 lakh home fibre connections, ring-topology resilience upgrade for 1,692 Phase-I GPs.

Problematisation

The very need for an "amended" programme, the topology change, and the on-demand-village clause flag the gaps the original BharatNet left — slow rollout, last-mile failure and fragile linear networks — useful for problem-statement framing on infrastructure delivery.

Position

The renaming of USOF as Digital Bharat Nidhi under the Telecommunications Act, 2023, and the choice of a State-led model, evidence the government's stated stance that universal connectivity is a financed statutory obligation, not a discretionary scheme.

Deploys into: e-governance and digital service delivery in rural India (GS2.15) · infrastructure — communication networks and the role of the State in last-mile broadband (GS3.9) · cooperative/competitive federalism in public-service delivery · bridging the digital divide.

Ministry of Communications · 2026-05-13 · PRID 2260827 · PIB source ↗