The Centre and 16 States and Union Territories have signed an agreement to connect every Gram Panchayat with a broad band connection.

The agreement was signed by the Department of Telecom and the Special Purpose Vehicle 'Bharat Broadband Network Limited' in the presence of the Union Minister for Communication and Information Technology Kapil Sibal in New Delhi.

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Sibal said the entire cost of about 20 thousand crore rupees for the project will be funded by the Centre. He said it will cover around 1,40,000 Gram Panchayats across the country.

The project will be implemented in States and Union Territories including Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jhharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Puducherry.

The National Optical Fibre Network aims at connecting all the 2 lakh 50 thousand Gram Panchayants in the country with high speed optical fibre network by December 2013.

Mr. Sibal asked the States to provide incentives to the manufacturers of electronic appliances to make the products affordable to aam admi. He said the states should start preparing the digitized data to be uploaded on the electronic highway system.

The Minister said the Centre will soon convene a meeting of State Information Technology Ministers to finalize the process for uploading standardised data.