More bizarre ideas from the Mayor

Tele twist to pay ’n’ park tale
The Times of India

Bangalore: Could the future parking attendant be a Hutch (or Airtel, Reliance, Spice or Tata Indicom) guy?

There’s a tele twist in the payand-park tale. For those fretting about no parking attendants to take care of those swish flashy cars or even navigate their vehicles, mayor R. Narayanaswamy has a scheme: why not ask telecom majors to maintain parking attendants?

Sometime next week, a meeting of all the telecom majors in the city — Hutch, Airtel, Reliance, Spice, Tata Indicom — would be called and the proposal would be placed for consensus and approval. Explains the mayor: “The telecom majors in the city are getting so many benefits from Bangaloreans. So many telephone towers (cell sites) are erected and each tower enables connectivity to thousands of people. Purely as a goodwill gesture, why not they maintain parking attendants at roads that hitherto came under the pay-and-park scheme?’’

The proposed modus operandi runs thus: telecom majors, given the tacit background of cell-sites being erected in the city, would be asked to maintain parking attendants in the four ranges of the city. The incentive for them for such a gesture is also well in place — the parking attendant can wear uniforms or T-shirts with the company logo splashed all over. She/he would be allowed to display the particular company merchandise too. Such an incentive, say BCC sources, translates to free publicity.

Says a senior BCC official, “A huge chunk of the hoardings belong to telecom companies, besides they put up cell sites with almost no regulation. An aerial view of Bangalore shows how terrible the city looks because of this. These are companies earning crores every day. We spend crores on maintaining and repairing roads, they come and dig it up overnight. So it is not out of bounds to ask them to maintain parking attendants.’’

But are telecom majors in the city open to such an agreement? When this paper informed Airtel’s CEO, south and central India, Jagadish Kini, about a forthcoming meeting on putting up parking attendants, this was his response: “As a concept it sounds good to me and Airtel would be open to such a proposal. But it depends on which roads we get, I’m not sure how we’d respond if we got some interior bylanes. The city has given us so much, it’s pay-back time.’’

Jacob Perez, VP marketing, Spice Telecom, says: “We’re certainly open to the concept, but the modus operandi is debatable. It’s a good debate. I’d be interested in promoting the brand with more visibility.’’

In the past, the BCC council had mooted levying charges in the form of ground rent for mobile towers, licence fees for cables, junction boxes and decks installed on pavements. But the technical snag was, they weren’t empowered to levy charges on OFC companies.

In reality, the government policy on IT allowing private telecom operators to provide bandwidth and connectivity through OFCs has allowed these companies a free “right of way.’’