It was as if the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) did not have enough problems in the form of service disruptions caused by uninformed road digging by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and the power distribution company. The public telecom utility is now plagued with a new kind of menace, that of cable theft.

In about a month’s time, the BSNL has recorded cable thefts at several parts of the city, including Hadapsar, Yerawada, Kalas and Wanavdi, that led to service disruptions for days together. The telecom cables were stolen after they were incidentally scooped out for the road excavation work. The BSNL said it was helpless in curbing such incidents, and was suffering losses more than usual.

“The PMC has always been carrying out road digging work without duly intimating us. Hence, whenever the roads are dug haphazardly and without our consultation, we have to bear the brunt as many of our cables laid underground get exposed and cut. This has been a constant menace that we had been facing so far,” BSNL spokesperson MS Solegaonkar said.

“But nowadays, a different kind of trend has started mushrooming, which is a fallout of the road-digging work only. When a bunch of cables comes above the surface, after it was incidentally scooped out, some small-time thieves steal the cables as they are made of copper. Selling these copper coils earns them good money,” she said.

Another senior BSNL official said, “Earlier, we could repair the connection in a few hours, after attending to the cable disconnection faults. But now, with the increasing incidents of cable thefts, we first have to spend time and money on getting a new bunch of copper cables. All these are giving us hard times and incurring losses to us. And this has affected the image of BSNL as a service provider.”

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