Calcutta, Oct. 1: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) today charged Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) and municipalities around the city with “extortion” for demanding exorbitant amounts as licence fee to set up towers of Calcutta Telephones.

The chief general manager of Calcutta Telephones, Samar Kumar Chakravarty, said he would meet Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee next week. “I will submit a detailed report to the chief minister and seek his help,” he said. “What is happening is tantamount to extortion.”

With BSNL planning to invest Rs 1,000 crore ? Rs 650 crore in the Bengal Telecom area and Rs 350 crore in the Calcutta Telephones area ? in the next six months, Chakravarty said the chief minister’s help was required to sort out problems.

He said projects to expand the cellphone network of Calcutta Telephones were delayed for months because of demands from the municipal bodies, leading to a sharp increase in project costs.

CalTel today announced that it would add one lakh customers every month from October to its cellular service CellOne and set up 700 towers in and around Calcutta. Bengal Telecom will set up 800 towers across the state.

By December, officials claimed, Metro stations would be covered by BSNL’s network.

Although a recent circular issued by the state urban and municipal affairs department put the upper limit of licence fees for setting up a tower at Rs 30,000, some municipalities were demanding fees between Rs 1 lakh and 3 lakh, Chakravarty alleged.

Saying there was “lots of cooperation” from the governments in other states, Chakravarty asked: “How can we expand if the municipalities charge us exorbitantly?”

BSNL authorities are also facing inconvenience in laying optical fibres in the city.

Earlier, to lay the fibres, trenches had to be dug, which damaged roads. But now the damage is minimum as the fibres are laid by micro-tunnelling for which only two small pits are dug.

“But CMC has banned our optical fibre laying work till Diwali. The numerous pits dug to set up Puja pandals are causing much more damage to the roads,” Chakravarty said.

He said BSNL has to spend Rs 1,300 to Rs 1,500 per metre for reconstruction of roads which were damaged because of the telecom department’s work.