With the rising number of complaints about inconvenience caused by road digging work, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has decided to get strict before permitting telecom companies to lay cables. “The civic administration is not taking any chances this time and is extremely cautious about giving permission for digging roads to agencies laying utility service cables,” said a PMC officer. According to municipal commissioner Kunal Kumar’s decision, the civic administration has rejected permission to many telecommunication companies to lay cables until they clear the dues pending with the civic body. “The telecommunication companies have their mobile towers across the city. There were many of them that were illegally operating and were not paying property tax, so it was decided that the telecom companies that clear the dues would be allowed to dig roads to lay underground cables for establishing their network in the city,” he added. Also, the decision has been taken that no agency be allowed to undertake open digging unless other new methods are not possible. The permissions are for Horizontal Directional Drilling (HDD) and trenching, which cause the least damage to the surface and are easy to repair as opposed to the open digging process. The digging rates for the new technology-based process has been kept less than the charges for open digging, civic officer said, adding, “If the agencies violate the rules, then they are penalised with three times the charges for the particular stretch of digging.” The civic administration is ensuring that there is no wrongdoing and has appointed a separate vigilance team that verifies the digging work through on-site visits, he added. The PMC, to ensure that citizens do not suffer due to bad condition of roads during monsoon resulting from digging work, restricts the agencies from digging roads ahead of monsoon.
