India's telecoms regulator said on Tuesday it would ask all fixed-line phone firms to set up public telecommunication centers with high-speed broadband connectivity to help bridge a growing digital divide.

M.S. Verma, chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, told a convergence seminar he expected about 5,000 such centers to be set up in the country in the next few years with a telephone line capacity of up to 256 kilo bits per second.

India, which threw open its telecom industry to private companies after decades of government monopoly, expects to end the current year ending March with a tele-density of about 3.5 telephones per hundred people.

It aims to raise this figure to seven by 2005 and 15 by 2010, a level considered decent by international standards.

But worries remain about the spread of this telephone network to rural areas and slow connectivity because narrow telephone lines prevent delivery of an large volumes of information and software services from the Internet.

Currently, normal telephone lines deliver less than 50 kilo bits per second, severely restricting the speed of Internet access and preventing delivery of multi-media and bulky software applications.

Verma said Indian all telecom firms would have to set up such centers as part of the government's plans to impose minimum service obligations on them from April 2002 in return for a change in tariffs.

He said he expected the centers to be set up two years after the obligations were enforced.

India has about 2,700 short distance charging areas, the basic unit of telecom administration with a radius of about 50 km. "We plan to have two such centers in each area," Verma said.