Tamil Nadu policemen and their families will perhaps foot the cheapest cellphone bills as the State government is all set to procure a whopping 9.6 lakh SIM cards from the PSU telecom operator BSNL to implement a comprehensive Closed User Group (CUG) scheme for the police force.
The State government has to shell out just `1.2 crore more annually than the existing CUG scheme. But, the CUG network would expand to cover 1.2 lakh personnel from the present 12,000 odd officers, covering every member of the police force starting from a constable to the DGP, including the ministerial staff.
Besides making all official calls free, the new CUG scheme also offers unlimited free calls between family members of the police personnel for a meagre annual rental of Rs 264 per family CUG card. Under the new scheme, each police personnel will be given seven such additional family CUG SIM cards free of cost.
Following the announcement by Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in the Assembly on April 23, Director General of Police K Ramanujam negotiated with BSNL and got the offer at “competitive rates”. On Wednesday, Niranjan Mardi, Principal Secretary, Home Department, passed an order accepting the DGP’s proposal and sanctioning `3.47 crore for the scheme.
The call rates offered by BSNL to this CUG scheme are not detailed in the order. But it says the call rates are “amongst the lowest in the market”. A major lacuna of the existing CUG scheme is that it covers only officers in the rank of sub-inspector and above while the constables, who constitute a huge chunk of the police force, have been left out. As a result, the official phone calls made with constables are not covered in the CUG scheme. Secondly, facilities for personal calls were inadequate and most of the policemen preferred a second mobile with better options for personal calls.
Further, in the existing scheme the CUG numbers are designation based and hence the number of an officer would change on being promoted or transferred. But in the new scheme, a particular number given to the officer would remain the same till his retirement.
While the existing CUG scheme costs the exchequer `2.05 crore, the annual recurring expenditure of the new scheme is `3.2 crore.