With India’s ambitious BharatNet project, aimed at bringing broadband to rural areas, still to be completed, private sector companies were invited to pitch in. A series of tenders floated late July has witnessed about 40 companies jostling to get a share of the pie.

Telecoms and technology majors, including Bharti Airtel, Reliance Infratel, STL, Cisco, Larson & Toubro and Hughes Communications, were among nearly 40 companies vying to take broadband services to rural India as part of the country’s ambitious BharatNet project, a report in  Economic Timesstated.

Hinduja Global Solutions, Vodafone Group Plc, Indus Towers, RailTel Corporation of India, Power Grid Corporation of India, and Tejas Networks, which is majority owned by Tata Sons, were some of the other companies to have evinced interest, the  ETreport stated, which was based on documents reviewed by the newspaper.

In July, the Indian Government-owned BBNL had invited bids from companies for Rs 19,041 crore BharatNet project to roll out high-speed broadband services in the rural areas across 16 States.

The Indian Government promised to provide viability gap funding under the project.

“Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL) has invited global tender for the development (creation, upgradation, operation and maintenance and utilisation) of BharatNet through a public-private partnership model in 9 separate packages across 16 states for a concession period of 30 years,” BBNL had then said in a statement.

Bharat Broadband Network Limited is a government-owned telecom infrastructure provider, set up by the Department of Telecommunications within the Ministry of Communications.

Under the project, the government plans to cover an estimated 361,000 villages (including gram panchayats/local village administrations) across States of Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.

The existing BharatNet was connecting all the gram panchayats (GPs) of the country by laying OFC (primarily) to connect the village administrations to the local area head offices.

The scope of BharatNet has now been enhanced to connect all inhabited villages, approximately 643,000, of the country.

Separately, in July the government admitted in Parliament that satellite companies too could help bring broadband-via-satellite to the far-flung rural areas of India under the BharatNet project.

While Airtel co-funded OneWeb has already obtained a licence from the Telecoms Ministry to provide satellite based services, including broadband, others in the fray are Elon Musk’s SpaceX (Starlink project) and the Tatas-Telesat combine.