An initiative is underway to rid parts of Salt Lake of the tangled overhead cables that hang from lamp posts and droop precariously over roads and dividers.
Ward 39 councillor and mayoral council member Rajesh Chirimar wants the overhead cables to go underground in his ward. He has chosen the adjoining blocks of BA and CA in Sector I for a pilot project. “A detailed project report is being prepared and a viability study has been ordered to construct an underground conduit system using micro tunnelling to take the wires underground. Our engineers from the lights department have already taken the measurements of the footpaths along which the dedicated roadside conduits would run. They need to figure out the width of the ducts needed and the cost involved,” he told The Telegraph Salt Lake.
The proposal has been submitted to the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation and will come up for discussion in the next Board of Councillors meeting after the Assembly election. Chirimar is confident of it being approved. “If I can arrange to finance it from my councillor’s fund, then there is no reason why it will not be passed,” he said.
A councillor is allocated Rs 70 lakh annually. “I will divert the entire year’s fund that I get access to at the start of April. I have another Rs 20 lakh or so leftover from last year. If more is needed, I will approach other authorities for support,” he said.
BA Block in Salt Lake Sudeshna Banerjee
Work in both blocks has to happen simultaneously as the underground passage of the cables has to be continuous. “We have to see how much space is available as water and electricity pipes have also passed underground.”
All wire-based service providers— phone, cable and internet — will have to seek permission to use the duct once overhead wires are banned. A decision on the charges to be levied will be taken only after the proposal is passed. “We will see how the system works elsewhere,” Chirimar said.
Scene in Sector V
While New Town was free of overhead wires from its inception, having created the underground duct while the roads were getting constructed, closer home, Sector V has gone underground with its wires more recently.
“It took us about four years in all, with a break during the pandemic, to take everything underground, including the lanes and bylanes. The process had started in 2018-19 with the major roads. We completed the rest by 2022,” said an official of the Nabadiganta Industrial Township Authority, which is in charge of Sector V.
The conduits had to be created on both sides of the road along the lampposts. “We have about 21km of roads in Sector V. So we had to cover about 42-45km. A bunch of three separate ducts of about 150mm diameter have passed through. We decided in favour of three ducts to avoid entanglements of different cables,” he said.
NDITA charges the service providers Rs 200 per metre per year for use of the underground utility ducts. “This has actually reduced their cost also. They had to seek our permission and pay us a restoration fee every time they dug the road. Also there were problems of disruption of service every time the cable snapped due to a branch falling in a storm or some such reason. Those risks have got eliminated now,” he said. There are hatches every 30m to access the duct.
The biggest offenders in Sector V, as in the rest of Salt Lake, in this regard, are the cable TV operators. “There were charges for overhead use of the lampposts too but the cable TV folks neither took permission nor paid. Only those using optical fibre took permission,” he said.
Public service
Officials underline that such infrastructure projects are not driven by profit. “This is a public service aimed at eliminating visual pollution and ensure safety. The revenue we earn now covers maintenance costs,” the NDITA official said.
The Telegraph Salt Lake had earlier highlighted the dangers that cable and broadband wires pose to pedestrians and motorists, besides being an eyesore.
In 2021, a 26-year-old man died after his motorcycle got caught in a mesh of cables lying on the road near Baisakhi Island, and then a water tanker ran over him.
Before that, on January 1, 2018, another youth riding a motorbike had died after his two-wheeler was entangled in a heap of cables on the east-bound flank of the Park Circus bridge. After that the mayor of Calcutta had announced a similar measure in the city but nothing came of it.
There is no open-cut digging involved, an engineer pointed out. Microtunnelling, the technique proposed also for the pilot project in Salt Lake, is a trenchless method that uses a remotely controlled, laser-guided boring machine to create underground passages while simultaneously installing pipes.
Unfulfilled promises
The latest move follows a series of similar announcements over the years that failed to materialise.
In 2018, the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation had announced an ambitious plan to take all overhead cables in Salt Lake underground. With Sabyasachi Dutta as mayor, the decision had been cleared at a board meeting and Dutta had announced that work would begin soon.
The plan was aligned with the state government’s Green City Mission, under which dedicated roadside conduits were to be built across municipal areas. Civic officials had even held meetings with cable operators and broadband service providers, outlining a model where the Corporation would bear the cost of building the network while operators would pay a monthly maintenance fee.
Despite the announcements and initial consultations, the project did not progress beyond the planning stage.
Meanwhile, the problem has only worsened, with a growing number of service providers adding to the maze of wires across Salt Lake.
Given this track record, the current proposal — though more modest in scale as a pilot — is being viewed with cautious optimism by local residents. “Whether it finally breaks the cycle of announcement without execution will depend on how quickly the project moves from planning to implementation,” said a resident of BA Block, where Chirimar shared his intention in the course of a recent meeting with residents.
Wait and watch
The scepticism is also shared by the local cable operators, who are wary of the move, apprehensive of being asked to pay rent. A worker with Parama Cable Network, which provides cable connection to houses in AA, BA and CA Blocks, said: “The government has said this (cables going underground) several times. But they have given the ducts they have already put in place only to the big companies like Jio on rent. We are small operators, who are already paying several taxes. Let the government prepare such a system for us and only then, will we understand whether it benefits us or not,” he said.