Concerned over the procedural delay in erecting cell phone towers in the nine Maoist-affected states, Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde has shot off a letter to Minister of Communication and Information Technology Kapil Sibal seeking his intervention to expedite the process so that the interior villages located in the ‘red zone’ could be connected with rest of the country.
The idea, which was first put forward by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram in 2010, is facing procedural obstacles due to certain flip-flops by the Department of Telecom (DoT).
Sources in the MHA said that out of the proposed 2,100 towers, merely 350 could be erected by the state-run BSNL, which was selected on a ‘nomination’ basis by the DoT.
“The delay is mainly due to some policy matters which were handled in a very unprofessional manner by the DoT. In the last two years, the DoT failed to evolve a proper mechanism to award a tender.
“Initially in 2010, it decided to float a tender but immediately afterwards, it nominated the BSNL to handle the project under the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF),” sources said.
An unnamed official said the former Home Minister had also raised the issue of procedural delay and the tendering process with the DoT, but to no avail.
“The DoT formed a committee to look into the issues after the Union Ministry of Finance (MoF) had in June red-flagged the contract awarded to the BSNL on a nomination basis. As per the financial guidelines under the USOF, the Centre can only award a contract through the tender process which was violated by the DoT by nominating BSNL. It could have avoided this situation,” he said.
The DoT had in 2010 decided to pay `5000 crore from USFO to BSNL after it assessed that the towers would cost `3 crore apiece.
Since around `900 crore had already been spent, the fate of the entire project now hangs in the balance.
It is learnt that the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), had in the first phase wanted to connect at least 80 districts with the rest of the country, but due to the procedural delay the DoT offered a gateway to provide satellite connectivity as an alternate arrangement for the security forces to access its services.
Sources said the MHA rejected the idea saying that the security forces were already equipped with such facilities.
“The idea is to connect people living in the interiors and not the security forces which already have satellite phone connectivity,” they said.
