ATTOCK: Minister for IT and Telecom Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari on Saturday unveiled a plan to provide telecommunication services to six under-served areas of the country, said a ministry statement.
“The six geographical areas marked out in the divisions of Malakand, Sukkur, Sibi, Chaghai, DG Khan and Attock due to a large part of the population in these areas still in want of telecommunication services, will be covered under a project to be launched within the next few weeks,” the statement quoted the minister as saying.
The minister also chaired the fifth meeting of the Universal Service Fund’s Board of Directors. The meeting was attended by IT Secretary Farrakh Qayyum, Member Telecom Nooruddin Baqai, Telenor Pakistan’s CEO Tore Johnson, WOL CEO Azfar Manzoor and USF CEO Parvez Iftikhar.
“The funds for the project will be provided by the multi-billion Universal Service Fund instituted within the Ministry of IT through annual contributions received from telecom operators,” said the statement.
“The auction of the funds to be provided to the existing telecom operators, which will implement the project, is already under way.”
The minister said the designated under-served areas to be covered under the first phase of the project constituted approximately three per cent of the total population and 23 per cent area of the country.
He said the USF had prepared a plan to achieve 85 per cent population coverage and increase rural teledensity to five per cent by the year 2010.
He said another goal the USF had set to achieve was nationwide broadband penetration, by adding 1.5 million new users by the year 2010.
“Today, our teledensity is 42 per cent and our mobile phone subscribers’ base has gone beyond 60 million, prompting the government to introduce mobile phone banking which will further facilitate the subscribers in transferring their money from one place to another with a click of their handsets,” Leghari said.
He said the benefits of growth in the telecom sector were myriad and the whole economy had benefited with over 200,000 jobs created directly or indirectly during the last few years.
He stressed the exponential growth in the telecom sector owed a lot to consistent backing from the president and the prime minister to the ministry in its efforts to liberalise and deregulate the sector to ensure open competition.
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