Blitz India Business
NEW DELHI: BharatNet had absorbed ₹39,888 crore of an approved ₹42,068 crore by November 2025 — 94.8 per cent of the sanction on this desk’s computation — and had 96.70 per cent of its revised gram panchayat target service-ready. Of those service-ready panchayats, 33.20 per cent were operational. The three figures are from Report No. 19 of 2026 of the Comptroller and Auditor General, and read together they are a lesson in project finance rather than an accusation.
Where the money went, by phase
The approved outlay divides into ₹11,148 crore for Phase-I and ₹30,920 crore for Phase-II. Within Phase-II the report sets out the composition: capital expenditure ₹18,792 crore, operating expenditure ₹6,046 crore, last-mile connectivity through viability gap funding ₹4,066 crore, and replacement of poor-quality BSNL fibre ₹2,016 crore. This desk has verified that those four components sum exactly to the ₹30,920 crore stated.
The composition is itself informative. Nearly a fifth of Phase-II was earmarked for operating expenditure and fibre replacement rather than new build — that is, for keeping a network alive rather than creating it. The audit’s finding that the mean time to restore a fibre fault stood at 17 days, and that fibre faults accounted for about 48 per cent of non-operational cases, is the operational counterpart of that budget line.
The contracting finding, and the recommendation that follows
The report compares three implementation models and finds the milestone-based payment structure weakest under the central public sector undertaking-led model, which it links to lower service delivery, while the private-led model showed stronger financial discipline and better service delivery. It recommends a performance-linked disbursement model on the private-led pattern, with payments tied strictly to project milestones and service availability, and separately that acceptance testing be completed across all gram panchayats before a milestone is declared achieved.
The report also records that BSNL diverted ₹2,001.43 crore from the project for other purposes, that the amount has since been recouped, and that utilisation certificates are now required under the Amended BharatNet Programme. Blitz sets all three facts down together, as the auditor did, because the second and third are the remedy to the first.
The revenue question
The project was conceived to be self-sustaining. The audit finds that high maintenance costs against modest revenue have cut that expectation short, that only 17.91 per cent of available bandwidth was in use, that major telecom service providers withdrew over service quality, and that dark fibre went unleased in many cases for want of a State-level policy or a timely decision. The recommendations meet this directly: anchor tenancy by health, education and agriculture departments, tiered pricing with subsidised rates for priority sectors, and a targeted campaign aimed at rural users, MSMEs, public agencies and local businesses.
Offered only as corrective advice, to help the work move faster: the anchor-tenancy recommendation is the one with the shortest route to revenue, because the customer is already a government department with a budget line. Publishing, State by State, how many health centres, schools and agriculture offices are actually connected and paying — alongside the operational-panchayat count — would let the Amended BharatNet Programme be steered on the number that decides its finances, rather than on the number that decides its headlines.