Every Gram Panchayat will be connected with high speed optical fibre network by 2022. Through village level high speed broadband services, we will provide a range of services such as telemedicine, tele-education and agriculture related advisories.

A note on the claim. This entry was imported as a promise of a "National Cyber Security Policy to protect critical infrastructure". The 2019 manifesto contains no such commitment — India's National Cyber Security Policy dates from 2013, and a successor strategy has been in preparation for years without being released. What the manifesto does promise on digital infrastructure is precise and dated: "Every Gram Panchayat will be connected with high speed optical fibre network by 2022", with telemedicine, tele-education and agricultural advisory services to follow. That is what this entry grades.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology gave the position to the Lok Sabha on 5 August 2026: "As of June 2026, a total of 2.21 lakh Gram Panchayats (GPs) have been made service-ready under the BharatNet Project across the country, with BharatNet's Point of Presence (PoPs) operational at 80,472 GPs."

Two numbers, and the distance between them is the story. India has roughly 2.55 lakh gram panchayats. Service-ready — fibre laid and tested to the panchayat — covers about 87 per cent of them, four years after the promised date of 2022. But a point of presence, the equipment that lets an internet service provider actually deliver a connection from that fibre, is operational at 80,472 panchayats: under a third. Dark fibre running past a village is not broadband in it.

The services the promise attached to that fibre — telemedicine, tele-education, agricultural advisories — do exist and are reported elsewhere in the same answer, but they run largely over mobile networks rather than BharatNet. e-Sanjeevani "has served over 48 crore patients", and 5.01 lakh Common Services Centres are functional, 3.91 lakh of them at gram panchayat level.

The wider connectivity picture, which the promise sits inside, is genuinely transformed and should be recorded as such. Telephone connections rose from 93.3 crore in March 2014 to more than 133 crore in March 2026. "Internet subscribers jumped from 25.15 crore in March 2014 to 109.27 crore in March, 2026." Data costs "plummeted from Rs. 269 per GB in 2014 to roughly Rs. 8-10 per GB in 2025-26". Under the Digital Bharat Nidhi mobile scheme, 24,784 towers had been commissioned by 30 June 2026. Much of that is the result of private competition in mobile data rather than a government fibre programme, but it is the reason rural India is online at all.

BharatNet itself has been restructured repeatedly — the Amended BharatNet Programme now covers upgrading Phase I and II, ring architecture and a single implementing agency — which is the ordinary signal of a project that did not work as designed.

A dated promise, missed by four years on the easier measure and by a wide margin on the one that matters. Our verdict is partly accurate.