In a major setback to the Department of Telecom’s efforts to rope in more players for setting up mobile towers in nine Naxal-hit states, only two companies have shown interest in the >much-delayed project that is being considered a key element in government’s fight against Maoists.
In March this year, the Telecom Commission, highest decision-making inter-ministerial body, had asked the DoT and the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, who has to execute the project, to go for retendering citing project’s higher costs and less number of participants. But after two months of the re-tendering exercise, the two companies – Vihaan Networks Ltd and HFCL – who had earlier also qualified the technical bidding are again in the fray as no other company, Indian or foreign, decided to participate in the bidding process. “We have been pushing for this project since 2010. The Cabinet cleared the proposal last year but since then the Telecom Commission, the DoT and the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), which is funding the
project, have been sparring over some issues, causing undue delay...It is sheer waste of time. We have been reminding the DoT the urgency of the project as it is hurting our fight against Maoists, but to no avail,” a senior Union Home Ministry official told The Hindu . Senior DoT and BSNL officials say it would take another three to four weeks to finalise the bids. “Vihaan Network Limited and HFCL have submitted their bids. There techno-commercial bids have been opened,” BSNL Chairman and Managing Director R.K. Upadhyay told a news agency.
Though the Telecom Commission had called for re-tender as the project’s cost was pegged at higher side, industry sources say its revised cost remained the same. In May last year the Centre had approved a cost of about Rs.3,046 crore to setting up and maintenance of 2,199 towers in Naxal strongholds in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh.
The project was to be completed by June 2014, but some confusion between the DoT, BSNL and USOF over its costing and technical specifications of equipment to be installed caused the delay. Though the project was conceived over three years ago by then Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram to strengthen government's anti-Naxal operations, the Union Cabinet cleared it last year with a 12-month deadline soon after the top Chhattisgarh Congress leadership was wiped out by Maoists in a deadly attack in the Bastar region.
