Made in Humane Club
NOFN-Better Late than Never?
My last post was about NOFN and the government considering private sector involvement. Not much has been reported about that realization being actually put into practice. Today’s Financial Express does report however that,
Industry analysts have all along being critical of the project from the point of view that its implementation is being done by PSUs rather than awarding work to private sector agencies on a turnkey basis.
In fact, with the delays and a realisation in the top echelons that the deadline would be missed, DoT is also considering roping in private agencies. Under it, the plan is to divide the the entire country into zones and allocate private players to lay the network. In this outsourcing model, [USOF model] the role of the government would be only supervisory, setting benchmarks, providing incentives for completion of work on time and levying penalties in case of delays.
Well what can one say, I have blogged about this a lot. In my view such expensive mistakes are a problem of the (lack of) regularity neutrality problem we face. Please see my recent paper titled, “The State of Broadband in India: A Call for Regulatory Neutrality” at
http://circ.in/pdf/Regulatory-Neutrality-in-Broadband-India.pdf