Telcos pass buck to MCD on tower closure
A day after telecom secretary Rakesh Garg called up the owners of telecom companies asking them to set their house in order on the call drop issue, operators stuck to their stand that the gover nment should intervene to stop local bodies from closing down towers.
“…Continuing unilateral activity of the Delhi Municipalities of sealing our cell sites will cause increase in call drops and inconvenience to consumers,” they said in a letter to Garg and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) chairman RS Sharma on Friday.
The chief executive officers of Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, MTS, Tata and Reliance Communications are signatories to the letter.
Communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has been marked a copy of the letter.
“We request that all the sites which have been sealed in the last few weeks be de-sealed to ensure call drop issue is immediately improved,” the letter states.
Telecom operators have warned that for every 40 sites being sealed, there is an average of 20% rise in incidence of call drops. For instance, in the last two days, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has sealed 16 sites across the Capital. In the last month 70 sites were sealed.
Similarly, sites have been shut down in Mumbai also due to arbitrary actions by the municipal corporation and resident welfare associations (RWAs). In the last year alone, about 1,700 sites have been shut down all over India, the letter says.
The operators say that while on the one hand Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the telecom secretary have been urging the industry to ensure there are no call drops, at the same time local bodies’ actions are hampering their efforts to achieve this.
Assuring continued investment and optimisation of networks, the six operators sought help and intervention of the telcom secretary as well as the Trai chairman in de-escalating the situation.
The operators said that parallely, they would continue to seek legal redress and dialogue with MCD through Cellular Operators’ Association of India, Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India and Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association.
The operators’ letter pointed out that MCD has even ignored the orders of Delhi High Court to not seal sites where due permissions have been obtained, and to de-seal the some sites.