The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has issued a public notice asking telecom service providers (TSPs) and Internet service providers to declare unauthorised OFC cables laid in the city after which the same will be regularised.
According to the latest data available with the BBMP, 31 companies had taken permission to lay 12,463 km of ducts, but on the ground the companies have laid 97,000 km of ducts. This means 84,537 km of ducts are illegal. For one km of ducts, TSPs have to pay about ₹850 and non-telecom companies have to pay ₹450 as ground rent.
Several attempts to regulate OFC laying in the city, mobilise revenues, and also protect roads, which are usually indiscriminately dug up by these companies, have failed.
This July, Chief Civic Commissioner Tushar Giri Nath said Deputy Chief Minister and Bengaluru Development Minister D.K. Shivakumar had instructed the civic body to prepare a report on the permission given for ducts in the city and an on-ground report of the ducts.
He had then said that the civic body will revise the penalty for illegal cables and regularise all existing OFCs in the city.
Former BJP councillor N.R. Ramesh, who headed a OFC committee in the BBMP council in 2013 and spearheaded a similar regularisation exercise in 2015, said the civic body had the potential to earn up to ₹15,000 crore from the exercise.
“In 2015, a similar announcement was made and companies only declared 1,200 km of illegally laid OFCs, which were regularised after collecting penalty. Even now the same process will likely be followed,” he said.
However, with no severe repercussions for laying illegal OFCs, TSPs and Internet service providers lack incentive to declare OFCs and pay the penalty incurring huge costs, sources in the civic body said.
While there have been suggestions made by Mr. Ramesh that the civic body pull out or pour acid into illegally laid ducts to make these OFCs defunct, as a way to force these companies to come around, sources in the civic body said this would disrupt mobile and Internet services in the city, and given that the city is the Information Technology (IT) hub of the country, these services were considered critical.
