The policy aims to provide affordable and reliable broadband on demand by the year 2015 and to have 175 million broadband connections by the year 2017.

Communications Minister Shri Sibal said the policy has the vision of leveraging telecom infrastructure to provide all citizens and businesses, both in rural and urban landscape with digital opportunities.

“The primary objective of the new policy is maximising public good by making available affordable, reliable and secure telecommunication and broadband services across the entire country,” he said.

The government likewise said it seeks to provide high speed and high quality broadband access to all village panchayats through optical fibre by 2014 and progressively to all villages in the country.

The Telecom Commission, the decision making arm of the Department of Telecom, has already cleared the Rs. 20,000-crore (US$4 billion) project to provide broadband connectivity to all villages in the next three years.

One of the major strategies proposed in the policy is to make efforts to recognise telecom and broadband connectivity as a basic necessity like education and health and work towards ‘Right to Broadband’.

Another proposal is to revise the existing broadband download speed of 256 Kbps to 2 Mbps by 2015 and make higher speeds of at least 100 Mbps available subsequently.