The head of top six telecom companies have jointly approached the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to look into the issue of tower sealing, which in turn is responsible for growing instances of call drops.

In a combined letter addressed to the DoT and the TRAI, Gopal Vittal from Bharti Airtel; Himanshu Kapania from Idea Cellular; Sergey Savchenko from MTS; Gurdip Singh from Reliance Communications,   N. Srinath from Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) and Sunil Sood from Vodafone India, have requested the government to step in to stop sealing of towers, especially in New Delhi and Mumbai. They have directly blamed the tower-sealing drives by Municipal Corporations for call drops.

In this letter, the operators have stated that for every 40 towers sealed by the government, they witness an increase of 20 per cent in call drops. As per the numbers reported by the operators, a total of 1,700 sites have been sealed all over India in the last 12 months.

Operators have requested the government to de-seal these towers immediately, as they have all the required licenses, permissions and even the required fees has been paid.