BharatNet Has Built the Highway. But is Rural India Actually Online?

India has spent years laying the digital roads into rural India. Now Parliament wants to know why so many of them aren't carrying enough traffic.

A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology has flagged gaps in the rollout and utilisation of BharatNet, the government's flagship rural broadband programme, and called for a comprehensive audit of how the project is performing across states and implementation models. The numbers explain the concern. As of February 28, 2026, operational BharatNet Points of Presence, or PoPs, were available at 78,899 Gram Panchayats, against roughly 2.64 lakh Gram Panchayats nationwide. That means the programme's infrastructure has expanded substantially, but universal operational coverage remains some distance away.

How much infrastructure has BharatNet actually built?

Quite a lot. The Department of Telecommunications told the committee that 7.19 lakh kilometres of optical fibre cable had been laid under BharatNet by February 28. The programme had also received ₹40,635 crore from Digital Bharat Nidhi for Phase I and Phase II. BharatNet began life in 2011 as the National Optical Fibre Network, with the ambition of connecting every Gram Panchayat with broadband. It was subsequently reworked as BharatNet under the Digital India programme.

So, why is Parliament worried?

Because infrastructure on the ground does not automatically mean connectivity for citizens. The committee said the pace of implementation remains uneven across states and implementation models, pointing to gaps in planning, coordination and execution. It has therefore asked the Department of Telecommunications to conduct a state-wise and model-wise performance audit, identify bottlenecks and produce a revised, time-bound roadmap for connecting every Gram Panchayat.

What about the network that already exists?

That is the second concern. The Department reported 9,48,237 active Fibre-to-the-Home connections under BharatNet as of February 28, all in rural areas. But the committee said utilisation of the infrastructure remains "sub-optimal" compared with the scale and potential of the network. In other words, India isn't only facing a build-out problem. It also has a last-mile and utilisation problem.

What does the panel want next?

The committee wants BharatNet to move from measuring how much fibre has been laid to measuring how effectively that fibre is actually being used. That means faster connections to Gram Panchayats, more FTTH connections, clearer accountability across implementation models and a state-wise assessment of where the programme is getting stuck. The bigger question is no longer simply whether India has laid the digital highway. It is whether the highway is actually taking rural India where it was supposed to go.

(With inputs from ANI)