As many as 600 cell phone towers in Tamil Nadu have inexplicably disappeared since the COVID-19 outbreak started in 2020.
Although the mobile phone towers hadn’t been monitored since 2017, GTL Infrastructure Limited, which installed them has claimed that they had been stolen.
The mobile phone tower installation company has its corporate office in Mumbai and a regional office in Chennai’s Purasavakkam. According to reports, the corporation installed and maintained 26,000 mobile phone towers in India. In Tamil Nadu alone, more than 6,000 mobile phone towers have been set up and are being maintained.
Due to significant losses, the private tower service company discontinued operations earlier in 2018. The nation’s mobile phone towers lost their ability to provide network service as a result. The businesses in charge of monitoring it were unable to visit the tower site during the COVID-19 period to do monitoring and maintenance while these mobile towers in Tamil Nadu were not in use.
When officials recently went to check on the status of mobile phone towers that weren’t functioning for other network purposes, they were shocked to see that a tower in the Erode neighbourhood had vanished. According to the company that installed the mobile phone towers, a complaint was made as a result and a case was opened at the police station in the neighbourhood where the tower was situated.
More than 600 towers had vanished, it was discovered in later examinations of Tamil Nadu’s non-operational mobile phone towers. The victim company claims that the enigmatic gang specifically took advantage of the COVID-19 closure to seize its unmanned and unattended mobile phone towers.
Following a complaint from a corporate executive, the police learned that not only one but, a staggering total of 600 towers vanished. The incident was confirmed by a government official who requested anonymity.
In the end, the corporation added that there are numerous such towers and that the police should act quickly to stop such robberies in the state. The corporation made it clear that the loss is now indicated in crores and that constructing a mobile phone tower would cost between Rs 25 lakh and Rs 40 lakh.
A Vodafone cellphone tower that was installed in the Joodal Pudur neighbourhood of the Madurai district of TN, at a cost of Rs 28 lakh, is said to have vanished in January of this year in a similar incident. The latter constructed the tower in Koodal Pudur’s Amravati street neighbourhood for a total of Rs 28.82 lakh. The problem was discovered when the telecommunications provider decided to inspect the nearby tower after receiving repeated.
Ms Kalinga