A 1,868 Kilometre Undersea Cable Brought Fibre Internet to Eleven Lakshadweep Islands on 3 January 2024, and the Digital Bharat Nidhi Counts 8,312 Fibre-to-the-Home Connections on Its Bandwidth

The Kochi-Lakshadweep Islands Submarine Optical Fibre Cable (KLI-SOFC) was dedicated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Kavaratti on 3 January 2024, and the Press Information Bureau (PIB) gives its total link distance as 1,868 kilometres. It brings fibre to eleven islands that had relied on satellite for telecom links, and the PIB says Lakshadweep is connected by a submarine optical fibre cable for the first time since independence. The Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN), the Department of Telecommunications fund formerly called the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), lists 157.31 Gbps of bandwidth leased on the project and 8,312 fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections.

A Gbps is a gigabit per second, a billion bits of data each second. FTTH means a fibre line that runs all the way to a house or shop.

Eleven landing points, 1,868 kilometres of cable

The PIB release of 3 January 2024 names the islands: Kavaratti, Agatti, Amini, Kadmat, Chetlat, Kalpeni, Minicoy, Androth, Kiltan, Bangaram and Bitra. The Lakshadweep administration lists ten inhabited islands, which are those names without Bangaram. It counts Bangaram as uninhabited, with 61 people enumerated there in the 2011 Census. The islands lie 220 to 440 kilometres from Kochi on 32 square kilometres of land, the administration says. Our Lakshadweep profile covers how the territory is governed and what it earns.

The PIB lists the work as a marine route survey, cable laying, civil construction of the CLS stations (the shore stations where the cable lands), and installation, testing and commissioning of the end terminals. CableCommunity, quoting the detailed project report that Telecommunications Consultants India Limited (TCIL) prepared, gives a design life of 25 years and six fibre pairs across 13 segments.

The satellite link it replaced

Before the cable, the PIB says, the only means of communication with the islands was satellite. The Cabinet note of 9 December 2020 put the satellite limit at 1 Gbps and said the lack of bandwidth held back e-governance, e-education and e-banking. A later PIB release says BSNL had raised satellite capacity for Lakshadweep from 318 Mbps to 1.71 Gbps, and a Rajya Sabha reply reported on 14 December 2023 gave about 1.7 Gbps. A Mbps is a megabit per second, a thousandth of a gigabit.

The cable began as an announcement in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech on 15 August 2020. The Cabinet approved it on 9 December 2020, and the DBN project page says BSNL was nominated as the executing agency by a letter of 18 December 2020. The target was May 2023, which the DBN page describes as within 1,000 days of the announcement.

Who built it and who paid

BSNL, the state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, was the project executing agency, with TCIL as technical consultant, and the Cabinet note says the asset belongs to the USOF under the Department of Telecommunications. The PIB says the work went to NEC Corporation India through global open tendering. NEC dates the award to September 2021 and the completion to June 2023.

The Cabinet note gave the cost as about Rs 1,072 crore (roughly Rs 10.7 billion) including five years of running costs, funded by the USOF. The DBN project page splits the figure: Rs 837 crore of capital spending from the DBN and Rs 235 crore of running costs over five years from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Lakshadweep administration. The PIB release of 3 January 2024 gives the cost as Rs 1,072 crore plus taxes. It adds that the bandwidth is open to all telecom service providers.

A Lok Sabha reply that the PIB published on 10 March 2026 says DBN funding also covers BharatNet on the mainland, the village fibre network that our explainer follows.

Capacity: the figures each source gives

The Prime Minister’s Office release of 3 January 2024 says the cable will raise internet speed from 1.7 Gbps to 200 Gbps, by more than 100 times. At Kavaratti, the PIB reports, Modi said the project would ensure “100 times faster Internet for the people of Lakshadweep”.

NEC says in its release of 12 January 2024 that the system has an initial capacity of 2x100 Gbps, which adds up to the 200 Gbps in the Prime Minister’s Office release, and can be expanded up to 1,600 Gbps per fibre pair. A written Rajya Sabha reply reported on 14 December 2023 by Communications Today and TelecomTalk says the project is designed to offer speeds up to 100 Gbps and support 4G and 5G, and that trial traffic had been fed into the network.

The DBN project page counts leased bandwidth: 157.31 Gbps in all, of which 49.31 Gbps is leased from Kochi to the islands and 108 Gbps between islands. Design speed, initial capacity, expansion limit and leased volume are separate measures.

Fibre, 4G and 5G on the islands

The same Rajya Sabha reply gave 3,972 FTTH connections on the project network at that point. The DBN project page lists 8,312 FTTH connections using the project bandwidth, more than double the earlier count. The page carries no date, and tuput read it on 22 October 2026.

A Lakshadweep administration release, which Communications Today carried before the cable was finished, described a Rs 61 crore telecom package from the Department of Telecommunications: 18 new 4G tower sites, upgrades of 19 existing 2G sites to 4G, and 225 kilometres of optical fibre for FTTH. The Lok Sabha reply of 10 March 2026 lists a 225 kilometre fibre network in the islands for FTTH and other services.

TelecomTalk, citing the Department of Telecommunications’ monthly count, reported two 5G base stations in Lakshadweep in October 2023, the islands’ first. It also reported in 2024 that Airtel 5G Plus was available at Agatti and Kavaratti. A PIB review of the department’s year, dated 26 December 2024, says 5G and FTTH services have been launched in Lakshadweep using the KLI bandwidth.

Telemedicine, schools, banking and tourism

The 2020 Cabinet note listed what the link was meant to serve: e-governance, fisheries, coconut-based industries, high-value tourism, tele-education and telemedicine. It added that the islands had the potential to become a hub of logistic services. The PIB release of 3 January 2024 names telemedicine, e-governance, educational initiatives, digital banking, digital currency use and digital literacy. The Rajya Sabha reply expects gains in education, telemedicine, e-commerce, digital governance and tourism.

At Kavaratti the Prime Minister said tourist arrivals had risen five-fold compared with five years earlier, according to his office’s release, and that a destination master plan was being drafted under the Swadesh Darshan scheme. The release gives the five-fold figure as a general comparison, not as an effect of the cable. Our reef survey piece covers the reefs around the islands.

Where the sources differ and what comes next

The Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar cable, 2,312 kilometres according to the PIB, reached Port Blair and seven other islands. The Rajya Sabha reply said bandwidth use there rose from 4.1 Gbps to 70.31 Gbps and fibre-to-the-home connections to about 34,500, and a PIB review of December 2024 puts bandwidth utilisation at 205 Gbps. Our Andaman and Nicobar profile covers the territory. The same reply gave digital transactions there, from about 10 lakh to 2.2 crore. For Lakshadweep it lists expected benefits, and the official documents tuput read publish no island-level counts yet for telemedicine sessions, school connections or digital payments.

Official documents give the Lakshadweep cable’s length in several ways: 1,868 kilometres of link distance (PIB, 3 January 2024), 1,869 kilometres (PIB, 2025 and 2026), a route length of about 1,772 kilometres (PIB, 26 December 2024) and about 1,870 kilometres (NEC). The TCIL plan quoted by CableCommunity in 2020 gave a route length of 1,921.16 kilometres and a cable length of 1,989.19 kilometres. This article uses the PIB’s 1,868 kilometres.

None of those documents announces a second cable or an extension beyond the eleven islands in the 2020 Cabinet note. The PIB backgrounder of 23 September 2025 says the satellite capacity increase for Lakshadweep supplements the fibre cables.