After crossing all the hurdles, BSNl will begin installing mobile towers soon in Naxal-hit areas, across the State. Over 700 mobile towers are to be set up across Jharkhand after the Union Cabinet, on June 4 in 2013, gave its approval to install the towers at 2,199 locations across nine States affected by left-wing extremism (lWE).
“Initially, the contractors were not turning up to take up the job in some of the areas but that has also been sorted out and it is expected that the work will be started soon,” said a highly placed source in the Police department. The Jharkhand Government had constituted a core committee, headed by the Chief Secretary, on February 20, last year to weed out the problems faced by BSNl in providing connectivity in Naxal-affected areas.
Moreover, some of the issues being raised by the BSNl regarding the wattage of the Base Transceiver Station (BTS) have also been sorted out. “The BSNl had petitioned before the Government suggesting high intensity BTS of 20 watts while an approval for five watts was earlier granted to them,” he added. BTS is also known as base station (BS) and is commonly referred to as a “cell phone tower.”
Even the officials in the BSNl also do not see any hurdle in the execution of the project. “Process of tender has already been done vendors have also been finalised …. As soon as we get the names of the vendors, work of installing the mobile towers will be started,” said BSNl’s GM (Networking) KC Panday. According to Pandey, the project is completely funded by the Government of India as the towers are to be installed in the lWE affected areas in the State. “A total of 792 towers are to be raised all over the State some of which are in worst hit areas, he added. As the project is fully funded by the Government of India, we have no problem in raising the towers to the areas identified by the State administration, he added.
Pandey also added that as these towers are to be raised in some of the worst lWE affected areas for some specific purpose, the costing is bound to increase, to be taken care by the Government of India. According to an official estimate, the cost of installation of each tower will be around Rs 10 lakh to Rs 12 lakh and funds will be provided from the Universal Service Obligations Fund, a corpus being created by the Government through raising the Universal Access levy, said the source in the police department.
A total of 987 villages of Jharkhand will be ‘tele-connected’ under the Centre’s ambitious project setting up mobile towers in remote and inaccessible Maoist strongholds. Nine States — including Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, Bengal and Maharashtra — will get 2,200 mobile towers by this year-end. In the past four-five years, more than 200 mobile towers have been blown up in the nine States by Maoists alleging security forces were being informed about their movements and locations through mobile phones. Of late, several complaints of poor mobile connectivity have been registered from the villagers, security forces and people engaged in developmental projects in these States. However, villagers, security forces and development schemes workers have also repeatedly been raising the issue of poor mobile connectivity in lWE-hit zones.