Better to hire a messenger than to rely on phones

CHANDIGARH, June 1: Despite the tall claims of the Telecom Department about extension of better telephone services in the district, the town...

CHANDIGARH, June 1: Despite the tall claims of the Telecom Department about extension of better telephone services in the district, the town is probably the only place in the state where the services are so bad that people prefer to deliver messages personally to places like Bassi Pathanan and Sirhind falling within 4 km of the district headquarter. The telephone lines always remain busy. Describing his experience, Deputy Commissioner T.R. Sarangal said that for him, it was quite difficult to contact even his ADC or other officers who live just across the road in the same locality. To convey important official messages to Chandigarh, they were forced to arrange special messengers.

The Civil Surgeon of Fatehgarh Sahib described another interesting experience that his residential telephone went dead every Friday evening. “Maybe someone uses it during the weekend,” he said.

SDM Khamanon Dilip Kumar who lives in the Officers’ Colony here, said that officers of the SDO(T) office who were supposed to take care of the matter were never available and even after he had lodged complaints, nobody had really bothered to do something about them.

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Kumar said that all senior authorities whom he tried to contact tried to shield their staff. Kumar said that one could easily judge the work culture of the local office of the department by the way the draw lines of the connections in the Officers’ Colony were hanging (See picture). They were so low, he said, that any one could cut them at any time.

Divisional Engineer Telecom B.S. Saini, admitted that the services were not up to the mark and partly blamed the non-cooperation of the district administration for the situation.

He said that the telecom department had raised a demand to provide a piece of land for a telephone exchange and inspite of that being earmarked, was not being handed over to them.

Saini said that to improve the services, the department was ready to lay the Optical Fibre Cable but it was not possible in the absence of any proper building.

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He refuted the charges of poor overall working of the department in the district, and said that more than 5,000 new connections in the district had been provided in the recent past.

It is worthwhile to note that the telecom department has not given independent status to the district headquarter and it is still under the Telecom District, Patiala. The subscribers are forced to go to Patiala for the reddresal of their complaints.Similar and rather interesting is the case of Khamanon, a sub-division of this district that falls in telecom district Ludhiana, where the subscribers are forced to go for reddresal of their grievances.

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