Guwahati: Telecom minister Manoj Sinha on Tuesday asked the northeastern states to complete implementation of all telecom projects by 2019 to achieve the Centre's target of hundred per cent teledensity in the region by 2020.

Telecom department secretary Aruna Sundararajan said the total planned cost of all the telecom projects for the Northeast was Rs 10,749 crore, which is about one-eighth of the total investment planned by the department of telecom. The allocation is likely to be enhanced to Rs 15,000 crore.

Attending a two-day conference on implementation of BharatNet and other major projects in the Northeast, Sinha said the project's implementation in the region was slow because of frequent snapping of optical fibre cables during expansion of national highways, hilly terrain and law and order related issues. He said of the 12,017 gaon panchayats in the eight states of the Northeast (including Sikkim), 7,338 were taken up in the first phase but only 2,240 were service-ready.

"Improving telecom and Internet connectivity in the remote parts of the Northeast is a challenge due to various problems. So it was decided to have a meeting here to take stock of the problems and work out the solutions. In the meeting, it was decided that chief secretaries will review status of implementation of the projects every three months so that we can achieve the targets," Sinha said.

He said the government had achieved "a significant milestone" by connecting over one lakh panchayats across the country with high speed optical fibre network so far. BharatNet envisages delivery of high-speed broadband services to the country's 2.5 lakh gram panchayats by 2019.

Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Pema Khandu, Assam minister for water resources, IT and communication Keshav Mahanta, DoNER secretary Naveen Verma, IT secretaries of all the eight Northeast states, senior officers from DOT, chairmen and managing directors of BSNL, BBNL, TCIL, Railtel, among others, attended the meeting.

Sundararajan stressed the need for putting in place a strong and effective institutional mechanism to provide a quantum jump in digital connectivity in all the states by March 2019. She also called for erection of 6,994 mobile towers by June 2019 for expansion of mobile connectivity in the region.

Telecom density in rural Assam is 50 per cent while it is 67 per cent in the urban areas. In the other states of the Northeast, it is much lower.