Centre assures fund for Arunachal Pradesh to extend SWAN service

OUR CORRESPONDENT

ITANAGAR: Union Minister for Railways, Communication and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw has assured Arunachal Pradesh to fund for extension of State Wide Area Networks (SWAN) in all uncovered districts up to block level for proliferation of internet governance.

The Minister's assurance came when State Council for IT & E-Governance Chairman Doni Nich and Lok Sabha member from the state Tapir Gao called on him at his New Delhi office on Wednesday.

Vaishnaw also assured to visit the frontier State very soon to take stock of its communication & IT scenario, official sources informed.

The Centre had approved SWANs scheme in March 2005 with a total outlay of Rs 3,334 crore as grant-in-aid to be spent over a period of five years.

Under this scheme, technical and financial assistance are being provided to the states and UTs for establishing SWAN to connect all headquarters up to block level via district and sub-divisional headquarters in a vertical hierarchical structure with a minimum bandwidth capacity of 2 mbps per link.

Each State and UT can enhance the bandwidth up to 34 mbps between state and district headquarters and up to 8 mbps between district and block headquarters depending upon the utilization. SWAN is envisaged as converged backbone network for data, voice and video communications throughout a State and UT.

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