13 February 2011

Phone Towers

If you look carefully you can see THREE mobile phone towers behind the Arunachaleswarar Temple East Gopuram. As any recent visitor to Tiruvannamalai can testify, the town is becoming a veritable hive of unsightly towers.

The problem is compounded by the fact that each Telephone Company requires its own tower – and with the inducements of Tower land rental in town of Rs.20,000/- a month and Rs.10,000/- a month in the country, its not difficult for Telephone Companies to find willing land owners eager to rent their land for the installation of large mobile phone towers.

However, relief is possibly at hand according to an article which recently appeared online about the wireless industry’s development of a smaller antenna, tiny enough to hold in one’s hand.





“As cell phones have spread, so have large cell towers – those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that sprouted across the country over the last decade.

Now the wireless industry is planning a future without them, or at least without many more of them. Instead, it's looking at much smaller antennas, some tiny enough to hold in a hand. These could be placed on lampposts, utility poles and buildings – virtually anywhere with electrical and network connections.”

To read the rest of the article go to this link here



5 comments:

Divya said...

Aren't those towers supposed to be bad for health? I believe in USA there are regulations about how close they are allowed to be to human dwellings!

Anonymous said...

I'm afraid the mobile phone towers are everywhere. No government body seems to care and consequently it's a free for all in India!

Meenakshi Ammal said...

Large metropolitan cities like Bangalore and Mumbai have consumer groups vocal in opposing the proliferation of Cell Towers and also the extent of their harmful radiation.

Check out:
http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/2263-sprouting-mobile-phone-towers-

and a more recent article specifically about the extreme physical dangers of cell towers:

http://www.moneylife.in/article/78/13560.html

In which the article motes:

"the impact of mobile phone radiation on the human systems, complications in reproductive health and behaviour problems in children, want operators to take effective steps to curb harmful effects"

Anonymous said...

There is huge one near Sri Ramana Asramam. Is that included in this project?

Meenakshi Ammal said...

As far as I know there are no groups in Tiruvannamalai addressing the problem of the proliferation of Mobile Phone Towers.

However there are active resident groups in Chennai and Bangalore. In the papers sometime back there was an article about a challenge by a Mumbai residential group arguing against the installation of a tower on the roof of a house in their neigbourhood.

People are beginning to make their voices heard ... but not, as far as I understand in any meaningful way on this particular matter here in Tiruvannamalai.

Grateful for any additional information on this . . .