State allows cable landing project worth Rs1K crore

Kolkata: Taking up a series of projects to create thousands of job opportunities in the state, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced her government's decision of allowing setting up of a Cable Landing Station at Digha that is the third of its kind in the country after Chennai and Mumbai.

Most importantly, this is the first such initiative in which a Cable Landing Station is going to be developed in eastern India. Most importantly, it will help the state gain significance globally and most IT giants would be setting up their data centres in the state. Jio is developing the same in Bengal at an investment of Rs 1000 crore.

Explaining the project Chief Secretary Rajiva Sinha said at present the entire world is now dependable on Internet data. The possibility of investment at a place goes up where the capacity of data processing is more. Now, speed of data processing depends of the availability of bandwidth. The cabinet on Wednesday gave its nod for setting up the Cable Landing Centre at Digha where the international "submarine cables": that gets laid under the sea will be connected. It will help in direct international connection of the state with Singapore, Italy and Malaysia. West Bengal data centres of both IT and ITeS Most importantly, it will create employment opportunities and boost the economy of the region.

The Chief Minister has also announced that the state government will only develop the Tajpur Port as the Centre is not showing any interest at present despite agreeing to set it up. It was in December 2017, the Mamata Banerjee government had decided to give 74 per cent stake to the Centre in the proposed deep sea port at Tajpur in exchange of the construction of an iron bridge across Muriganga to connect Sagar Island with the mainland.

But the Centre did not implement the project yet. As per the actual plan taken up by the state government, in phase-I six of the total 15 berths will be constructed and rest of the nine berths will come up in phase-II.

All the terminals will be multipurpose one. There will be facilities to handle petroleum, dry bulk cargo and container cargoes in all the terminals. Moreover, there would be dredging work of only 18.8 km channels. Vessels with a parcel size of 60,000 tonnes will be able to avail the port with 15 metre draft which is several times more than that of the Haldia Port.

At the same time, Banerjee also announced setting up of West Bengal State Broadband Policy 2020 that will further help in employment generation. "I had taken up Railway Broadband Policy when I was the Railway Minister and it benefitted a lot," she said.