ISLAMABAD, Aug 18: The Minister for Information Technology, Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari, on Saturday unveiled a plan to provide telecommunication services to six under-served areas of the country.

He said the six geographical areas marked out in the divisions of Malakand, Sukkar, Sibbi, Chaghi, DG Khan and Attock due to a large part of the population in these areas still in want of telecommunication services, would be covered under a project to be launched within the next few weeks.

The minister was speaking after chairing the 5th meeting of the Universal Service Fund (USF) board of directors held here. The meeting was also attended by IT Secretary Farrukh Qayyum, member telecom Nooruddin Baqai, CEO Telenor Pakistan Tore Johnson, WOL chief Azfar Manzoor and USF chief Parvez Iftikhar.

The funds for the project would be provided by the multi- billion USF instituted within the ministry of information technology through annual contributions received from the telecom operators. The auctioning of the funds to be provided to existing telecom operators which would implement the project is already under way.

Mr Leghari said the designated un-served areas to be covered under the first phase of the project also constituted approximately 3 per cent of total population and 23 per cent area of the country.

He said the USF had thrashed up a plan to achieve 85 per cent population coverage and increase rural tele-density to 5 per cent by the year 2010. He said another goal the USF had set out to achieve was a nationwide broadband penetration, by adding on 1.5 million new users by the year 2010.

The minister said the telecom sector in Pakistan had come a long way from the past few years when the country had merely 4 per cent tele-density.

“Today, our tele-density is 42 per cent and our mobile phone subscribers’ base has gone beyond 60 million, prompting the government to introduce mobile phone banking which would further facilitate the subscribers in transferring their money from one place to another with a click of their handsets,” he said.

He said the benefits of telecom sector growth 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 telecom sector owed a lot to what he called the consistent backing and pushing from the president and the prime minister to the ministry of information technology for liberalising and deregulating the sector to ensure an open competition.