Government introduced TETRA without assessment: CAG
The Delhi government's decision to introduce the Terrestrial Trunk Radio (TETRA) communication service during the 2010 Commonwealth Games (CWG) was ill-conceived as it was done without proper assessment, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) said in its report on Friday.
Without proper assessment of the requirements of Delhi Police and other agencies as well as the replacement of existing networks with TETRA, the government planned to use this communication system, the report said.
The decision to introduce TETRA was taken in September 2008 and suggestions were asked from different agencies in October 2008.
The CAG report, tabled in parliament on Friday, said the government decided to introduce a TETRA network for the Games after seeing Beijing Olympics 2008, and awarded the contract to HCL-Motorola at Rs99.81 crore for an 87-month period -- covering not only the Games period but also a seven-year legacy period.
"The decision to extend TETRA for legacy use for seven years was ill-conceived," the report said.
"While taking such a decision, the government was also not clear how these 3,657 rented TETRA sets will replace Delhi Police's existing radio communication system of nearly 11,000 sets," the CAG report says.
And when in September 2009, Delhi Police expressed an intention to limit their participation in the TETRA system only to CWG-2010 and withdraw the previously projected requirement for the legacy period, the government persuaded the police commissioner not to withdraw the network and advised him to use it, the report says.
The report said that during the Games, Delhi Police clearly told the government about its dissatisfaction with TETRA's signal quality and termed it a failure.
After the tender was awarded, there was also a seven-week delay to operationalise the system.
The report says that most of these expensive TETRA sets have monthly rentals ranging from Rs2,168 to Rs2,365, and in effect are nothing more than mobile phones.
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