The BSNL office in Raiganj. Picture by Nantu Dey

Raiganj, Aug. 14: Landline- users here are having to do with a five-year-old telephone directory, though 4,000 numbers of the town changed in 2003.

With no helpline in place, the BSNL authorities have not come up with any solution for all these years.

Ever since the West Dinajpur district was cleaved into North and South, the telephone exchange at Mohanbati had been catering to the 26 wards of the town. With the demand for more connections on the rise, the authorities set up another exchange at Linebazar in 2003 for 13 of the wards, changing the numbers in those areas. However, the new numbers had no similarity with the original ones.

Uttam Sinha, a physician who has settled down in Los Angeles, said he regularly rang up his relatives from the US. “Once when I called home, the phone was answered by the manager of a rice mill. I thought that there was an error in the connection, but I never got through my number after that. I was worried about my people till I received a letter from them mentioning the new number,” Sinha said.

Preetam Roy, a BSF jawan who stays at Birnagar here, recounted how he was penalised for the number fiasco. “Since my house did not have a phone, I had given a neighbour’s number to my battalion, not aware that it had changed. In 2003, when I was on leave, the battalion called up the number. But it was someone else, and not my neighbour, who answered the phone. The battalion then sent me a telegram asking me to join. When I did, I was sent to a forward post on the border for two weeks (instead of one) for providing a wrong phone number,” Roy said.

Sources in the police station and the fire brigade said according to procedure, when residents called them for some trouble, someone in the same area had to be rung up to verify the information. But, without a directory, there is no way to give the return call, the sources said.

The divisional engineer of BSNL, Shibram Bhattacharya, said: “The general manager is out of town and I cannot tell you anything, though I am in charge.”