BHUBANESWAR: The Housing and Urban Development (H&UD) department has decided to form a single window clearance committee to ensure a co-ordinated effort in setting up mobile telecom towers across urban local bodies (ULBs).
The committee will be instrumental in regulating establishment of telecom towers in the ULBs. A notification issued recently by the H&UD department Commissioner-cum-Secretary G Mathivathanan stated that the committee will work towards issuing clearance for establishment of telecom towers in a time bound manner.
Every ULB will have its own committee under the chairmanship of the respective municipal commissioner. The committee will comprise representatives of development authority or regional improvement trust or special planning authority as applicable. It will also include representatives of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Public Works Department (PWD), Airport Authority of India (AAI), local power distribution company, National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and the Railways.
The committee members have been carefully selected to include representation from every sector, whose consent will be necessary before any telecom tower is put up. All applications for establishment of new telecommunication infrastructure towers (TIT) will be scrutinised by the single window clearance committee.
This measure will also come as a relief for telecom operators that are applying for no objection certificates (NOC) for setting up TITs as they will not have to approach different departments individually. This apart, the committee is expected to weed out avoidable NOCs thereby reducing processing time.
The installation fee, which has to be deposited with a new application for setting up new TITs in a municipal corporation, has been fixed at `one lakh.
Similarly, the installation fee for a new TIT in municipalities is `75,000 and in notified council areas (NAC), it is `50,000. For renewal of the TIT license which is due in every three years, the telecom operators have to submit 10 per cent of the installation charges.