Mobile service mooted for 58 Kishtwar villages

The Union minister for communication and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has said the government hopes to finalise a plan for cellular connectivity in 58 villages of Kishtwar district by the end of this fiscal.

The Union minister for communication and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad has said the government hopes to finalise a plan for cellular connectivity in 58 villages of Kishtwar district by the end of this fiscal.

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The assurance came after the minister of state, PMO, Jitendra Singh sent a written communique regarding lack of telecommunication facility in inaccessible villages of Marwah, Warman and Dachhan in Kishtwar. The communique was based on the data collected and compiled by MLA Kishtwar, Sunil Sharma.

The communication ministry has accordingly asked the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) to prepare a plan to establish voice connectivity in all the uncovered villages in Jammu and Kashmir, including these 58 in Kishtwar.

Ravi Shankar Prasad also assured Jitendra Singh that the centre will leave no stone unturned to provide good quality telecom service in J&K.

Expressing satisfaction over the communication minister's positive response, Jitendra Singh said it is hard for people living in the metropolis to imagine that there are vast areas in the country where telephone services are not available.

He said this anomaly had always weighed heavily on his mind and he had personally also suffered the constraints of the problem whenever he visited the remote areas in his constituency.