Uttarakhand floods: BSNL to fix mobile towers within 3 days

New Delhi: State-run telecom firm BSNL today said it will restore within three days its mobile towers at places where most of the stranded people are located in flood-hit Uttarakhand. “Our 270 BTS (mobile towers) were down till last evening across state. Out of these, we have restored 10 BTS at crucial locations where most of stranded people are located. In next three days most of the BTS will be up and running,” BSNL Chairman and Managing Director R K Upadhyay told PTI. He added that BSNL has restored 10 telephone exchanges out of 72 that were impacted by heavy rains and floods. “The absence of a usable road network has prevented access to the affected areas for movement of the technical teams. Additionally, the lack of electricity means diesel needs to be supplied to the sites on an urgent basis to restart the affected sites and keep the operational ones running,” industry body COAI’s Director General Rajan S Mathews said. [caption id=“attachment_895833” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  PTI[/caption] “The fuel stations located in the high altitude regions have been damaged and are running dry, while the unusable roads are preventing the supply of diesel to the affected sites from other places,” he added. BSNL said it has restored network at Janki Chatti, Barkot and Phata where most of the people are stuck. As per official estimates, around 50,000 people are stranded at various locations in Uttarakhand. Mathews said bigger issue is of power supply which is impacting the telecom sites that were working. “Special requests have been made to state authorities to make diesel available for mobile tower sites. All the headquarter of telecom companies are closely monitoring situation,” he added. BSNL said its mobile tower at Harsil is facing power crisis due to fault in power plant and shortage of diesel. The BSNL CMD said that floods have washed away optical fibre network due to which network at most of the places is not available. “Around 4 to 5 kilometers of optical fibre cable has been washed away by the flood between Agustmuni and Tilwara. It will take 3 days for us to lay these fibres after which most of the towers will start functioning,” Upadhyay said. On the other hand, Department of Telecom has written to District Magistrate of Uttarakashi to help telecom operators in restoration of their network. “As you are aware about present situation of Uttarakashi area where lot of tourist are facing problem due to non availability of communication network…you are requested to extend each and every possible support to telecom service providers to early restoration of telecom network in affected area,” DoT said in its letter. PTI