Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, the north-easter states are geographically too far away to take advantage of the optic-fibre. The increased costs and reduced bandwidth does not affect consumers using telephones or the internet, but is a dampener for the companies that rely on such bandwidth for their business. Moreover this infrastructural lacuna has held back local entreprenuers and deprived the youth of the eastern regions from local jobs——forcing them to migrate to the IT centers in the south.
Eastern state governments have bee keenly aware of the problem as has the central government in Delhi. The latter sanctioned an undersea cable to terminate at the Haldia port in West Bengal...this is due for completion in 2007.
West Bengal Loses out
West Bengal has lost out to Tamil Nadu as the landing point for the first undersea cable of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd ostensibly because the river at Haldia is too shallow.
After a year of intense lobbying by the West Bengal government led by its information technology minister, Manabendra Mukherjee, BSNL has finally decided on Tuticorin as the landing point for its undersea cable that will hook up with an international network at Colombo. Haldia in West Bengal has lost out.
BSNL’s chairman, AK Sinha, did not wish to be drawn into any political controversy.
All he would say was that Tuticorin to Colombo is the shortest distance.
However, senior BSNL officials pointed out that the Haldia site in West Bengal is at the mouth of the silt-plagued Hoogly and too shallow for comfort.
The undersea fibre-optic cable is expected to give a boost to BSNL’s Rs 4000-crore international long distance (ILD) traffic.
The West Bengal government had been lobbying for Haldia because it feels that the IT industry in eastern India would have gained immensely from the extra bandwidth of the cable.
At present, all international traffic to eastern India links up with undersea cables after travelling over land to either Chennai, Mumbai or Kochi.
IT in the east
This is what happens when you have a friendly government at the Centre: you can expect it to consider your wishlist. In what could be a significant development for West Bengal's IT hopes, Dayanidhi Maran, the cabinet minister for communications and IT, has asked Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) to look into the possibilities of locating an optic fibre cable landing station at Haldia in West Bengal. This marks a culmination of the state's repeated missives to the Centre for a landing station in the eastern part of the country, especially Haldia. This will be good news to all those players like Wipro, TCS and HSBC, who are looking to expand in the state and who would benefit directly from the lower bandwidth costs. In fact, Wipro's Azim Premji and TCS's S. Ramadorai have been personally working with the West Bengal government to this end.
A submarine landing station at Haldia is expected to cut connectivity costs by 10 per cent to 30 per cent. This holds true despite the fact that BSNL has started deploying Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing Systems (DWDM) between landing stations and cities in eastern India. DWDM is a technique that works by combining and transmitting multiple signals simultaneously at different wavelengths on the same fibre. That allows multiple video, audio and data channels to be transmitted over one fibre while maintaining system performance. However, connectivity is always easier and cheaper if the business is close to the landing station. Kolkata in these terms is still a 'class C' city, which means it is 500 km away from a landing station. So, as compared to Mumbai, telecom costs would be two to three times higher. A landing station at Haldia will also be seen as a growth driver for the north-eastern states in the country.
Kolkata offers about 580 mbps international satellite connectivity through VSNL and STPI (Software Technology Park of India). Two earth stations have also been commissioned at Kharagpur and Durgapur and cable connectivity is provided through BSNL lease lines from Mumbai. However, onward connectivity through submarine cable is only available from VSNL's Mumbai landing station and Bharti's landing station in Chennai. Before, there was talk that Reliance, along with Flag, would take up a submarine landing station at Haldia but nothing seemed forthcoming. The proposal for a landing station at Haldia was mooted during the NDA government, but couldn't make much headway. Now, with a 'friendly' UPA government in Delhi, the Left Front government in the state lost no time in tabling the same proposal. If the project comes through after the requisite techno-economic studies, the Left in West Bengal can prove that it can sometimes be right.
