The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : A 50-year wait for phones fructifies

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Oct 18, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

A 50-year wait for phones fructifies

By Our Staff Reporter

Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran (second from left) inaugurates a telephone exchange at Kavunji in the upper Kodaikanal hills on Sunday. Looking on is M.K. Stalin (third from left) MLA.

KODAIKANAL, OCT. 17. With the opening of a C-Dot electronic telephone exchange with a capacity of 250 lines by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited today, a five decade-old-dream of the people of Kavunji and Gundupatti became a reality.

Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran inaugurated the exchange.

Delivering the keynote address at the inaugural function here, he said 101 subscribers received BSNL connections today; 83 pending subscribers would be covered very soon. The villages covered by the exchange were Oajapuram, Mannavanoor, Kilavarai, Poondi, Polur and Kilanavayal.

Mr. Maran said the BSNL completed the project within a month, though the officials had sought two months first.

He said the villagers had appealed to M.K. Stalin, MLA, at a function held in the village on August 5 to provide them phone connections to help them know market price for their produce.

BSNL Chief General Manager K. Sridhara said the exchanges were set up at a cost of Rs. 38 lakhs. Apart from the sophisticated equipment installed, another speciality of the exchange was that this was a pole-less exchange. Underground optic fibres cables connected all the subscribers. The exchanges are also connected with a satellite. Earlier, the villagers had to travel 40 km to make a telephone call.

BSNL has also been striving to make it an automated exchange too, while taking steps to provide connectivity to the villages on the hill.

J.M. Haroon Rashid, Periakulam MP, said more towers should be installed in Kodaikanal to extend phone connections to all villages.

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