Council to consider proposal for laying cables in city

Dispute over road restoration rates likely to end

December 03, 2018 12:41 am | Updated 12:41 am IST - Kochi

After a delay of over two years and many controversies, the proposal of Reliance Jio Infocom Limited for laying optical fibre cables (OFC) through city roads will come up before the Kochi Corporation council on Monday.

This time, the council will consider the agenda for drawing overhead cables using poles as well as laying underground cables by trenching city roads. Most of the cabling work will be done using using poles, which would make the inspection easy for the civic administration. The trenching of roads will be for a limited distance, which would leave most of the city roads unscathed, said a civic official. The delay in considering files pertaining to the telecom service provider had given rise to a series of controversies in the council.

Bone of contention

The dispute over road restoration rates began in the council with the project proposal for laying gas pipelines. As the consortium, which is implementing the city gas project, insisted on paying only PWD rates for road restoration after trenching works, the telecom company too raised the demand. However, the civic administration objected to the demands and stood for revised rates, said a civic administrator.

Though the civic administration had approached the State government with a request to revise rates for road restoration works earlier, the government refused to entertain it. The civic administrators argued that restoration charges quoted by the PWD were grossly inadequate. They also think that any failure on the part of the firm to properly restore roads would eventually projected as their failure.

Later, the Public Works Department hiked the restoration charges and the new rates are mostly on par with the one quoted by the civic administration, he said.

The cabling would earn the city administration a revenue of around ₹30 crore, according to a civic administrator.

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