Discuss the role of Digital Bharat Nidhi and BSNL in last-mile rural connectivity. What challenges hold back saturation in tribal and remote areas?

Last-mile connectivity means reaching the most costly villages, which private operators skip because they are not profitable. Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN) pays for this coverage and BSNL builds it. Villages without 4G fell from 45,180 (2022) to 11,372 (2026) [1], but the hardest stretch is still left.

Role of Digital Bharat Nidhi

• Viability-gap funder: DBN is the Universal Service Obligation Fund, renamed in 2024 [2]. It funds the ₹26,316 crore 4G Saturation Project, covering building costs and five years of running costs. The project targets 24,680 uncovered villages and upgrades 6,279 villages that had only 2G/3G [3].
• Wide portfolio: it also pays for towers in LWE areas, Aspirational Districts and border areas, and for BharatNet fibre [2].
• Oversight: it orders third-party audits of the mobile projects it funds [2].

Role of BSNL

• Implementing agency: BSNL has commissioned 18,291 of 24,680 planned sites. On their peak day in October 2026, these sites served 10,21,048 active users [1].
• Indigenous technology: it uses the C-DOT core, Tejas radio and TCS integration. This makes India one of five countries with its own 4G stack and cuts dependence on foreign vendors in sensitive areas [4].
• Works alongside private operators: their own rural expansion also explains part of the national fall [1].

Challenges to saturation

• Terrain and security: difficult terrain, security risks, slow forest clearances and logistics. By February 2026, only 42% of border-outpost towers were commissioned, against 93% in LWE areas [2].
• Delays: only about 61% of saturation towers were commissioned by February 2026 [2], almost four years after the 2022 approval [3].
• Built but not working well: audits found coverage gaps, weak signal and duplicated towers [2]. In LWE Phase I, which BSNL also built on a nomination basis, only about 19.56% of sites met the 98% uptime benchmark [5].
• Weak economics: there are roughly 56 peak-day users per site [1]. Once the five-year running-cost cover ends [3], it is unclear who will pay to keep the towers running.

Way forward

• Link DBN payments to uptime and signal quality, not just to towers built.
• Provide security and logistics support and tower-sharing in the North-East, as the Standing Committee recommended [2].
• Fast-track forest clearances for single-tower sites.

DBN pays and BSNL builds, and together they have sharply narrowed the digital divide. The next phase of 26,000 sites [1] should be judged by service that keeps working, not by towers commissioned. That approach would deliver the constitutional promise of equal access and SDG 9's goal of universal access to the internet.