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The Airports Authority of India is going slow on allowing new cellphone towers to come up around the airport Drops in cellphone calls may become far more frequent in the next few months. The
Airports Authority of India (AAI) wants cellphone towers to be removed from several buildings around the airport. The reason is that these towers make the buildings taller than permitted by
AAI. Reality came home to roost with AAI, when Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL), a few months ago, approached Bombay high court to complain of several illegal buildings, hotels,
slaughterhouses and other structures coming in the way of flight operations, thereby posing serious threat to aircraft and lives. Notices were sent to these structures by BMC. So AAI is
going slow on giving No Objection Certificates (NOCs) to the cell phone tower companies who want to install new towers, and around 3,000 new NOC proposals have piled up at the Western region
headquarters of AAI in Mumbai. Countrywide, around 9,000 such approvals are pending, AAI sources reveal. "We are now going a bit slow in granting sanctions to these cellphone towers,
because we want to be doubly sure whether the installation on the buildings will breach the height limit," said a senior AAI official. Earlier, Standing Advisory Committee on Radio
Frequency Allocation (SACFA) under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Delhi gave clearances to wireless installations in the country. So the local AAI authorities
generally remained unaware about the new cellphone towers cropping up. However, recently it has been made mandatory for the cellphone tower companies to seek NOCs from local AAI offices
before proceeding with installation. The height of the building near the airport depends upon its relative distance from the funnel area of the runway. The nearer the location of the
building, the shorter its height must be. A deputy chief engineer from building proposals department of BMC said, "Our concern in these cases is to see that guidelines from the ministry
of civil aviation are followed by the concerned buildings. If the buildings have in their possession all such permissions for the cellphone towers, then we may regularise the towers."
—With inputs from Geeta Desai