The Centre has tweaked the key eligibility conditions for one of its most ambitious projects of laying a 1900-km long submarine cable system between Kochi and Lakshadweep Islands. This move came after domestic telecom industry bodies had complained to the Telecom Ministry and the PMO that the eligibility conditions for the global tender did not give a level playing field to the Indian companies.

The Rs 1072-crore project of BSNL, approved by Union Cabinet last December, involves laying a dedicated cable system using 6 fiber pair with 200 Gbps initial traffic capacity to connect all 11 islands of Lakshadweep.

Presently, the only medium of providing telecom connectivity to Lakshadweep is through satellites, but the bandwidth available is limited to 1 Gbps. A global tender to implement the project was invited in March but soon ran afoul of domestic companies who alleged that it was weighed in the favour of international companies due to stiff eligibility conditions.

The Telecom Equipment Manufacturers Association (TEMA) and the PHD Chambers of Commerce then wrote letters to DoT and the PMO, saying this may result in a single foreign-bidder situation.

Changes have now been made to the tender changing two key eligibility conditions. One, the requirement of cumulative turnover of last three financial years of a bidding company has been reduced from Rs 1,400 crore to Rs 600 crore. Another condition put earlier was that the bidding company or its parent/holding company should have executed at least two global submarine projects over the last 12 years, including one using “repeatered technology”, with each being at least 1000 kms in length with deployment depth of 3000 meters. This has now been changed to say at least two projects executed by the company of any technology should be of at least 1000 km length but the deployment depth of the same has been changed to 2000 meters.

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