KOLKATA: After three decades, residents along a stretch of Harish Mukherjee Road on Tuesday had an unhindered view of buildings on either side of the road and the sky without the cable clutter coming in the way. This was possible after cable TV operators, internet service providers and telecom companies removed the mesh of overhead cables that have become an eyesore all over Kolkata.
“All these years, all I could see when I looked out of the first floor window were cables. Initially, around 30 years ago, there was only one cable. Then gradually the numbers increased till it became a mesh of cables and blocked the view. After a while I stopped peering out of the window to avoid the eyesore. On Tuesday, I got my view back, thanks to the shifting of the cables underground. We residents of Harish Mukherjee Road are lucky the cleanup has started here. I hope it gets extended to other localities as residents there also deserve to have the skyline cleaned up,” said businessman Sayantan Das who lives on Harish Mukherjee Road.
Six teams with four to eight persons in each worked on the 2.2 km stretch from early Tuesday morning to pull down cables a day after all services had been shifted underground. Harish Mukherjee Road is the first stretch in Kolkata to migrate from overhead to under cable network for communication and entertainment. Though optic fibre cables of Kolkata Police, BSNL and CESC have remained, they too will be shifted underground in a fortnight. By the time they called it a day in the evening, 1.7 km on one pavement and 1 km on the other pavement had been cleared of overhead cables.
“We deployed the teams from Mitra Institution. While two teams moved southward in the direction of Kalighat fire station and pulled down cables from streetlight poles, the other four headed northward towards Rabindra Sadan. In all, 32 men were engaged in the cleanup operation. It will take three more days for the entire stretch to be freed of overhead cables,” said All Bengal Cable & Broadband Operators’ United Forum joint convener Tapash Das.
Harish Mukherjee Road had nearly 70 km of overhead cable by a dozen service providers including SitiCable, Hathway, Meghbela, Alliance Broadband, Jio Fibre, TataSky, Airtel and Vodafone. Around 30 km of cables were removed on Tuesday.
Work on the project had begun in 2020-end, two-and-a-half years after chief minister Mamata Banerjee had called for removing the mesh of cables spoiling the city’s skyline and causing fatal accidents like the death of an 18-year-old youth in Park Circus in January that year. Urban development minister Firhad Hakim had held multiple meetings with cable operators and other stakeholders but progress was slow till work on the pilot project began in December 2020.
