State-run Power Grid Corporation of India is planning to lease out space on its power transmission towers to independent tower firms or mobile service providers.

The company has already received an in-principle approval from its board of directors for this new business stream and it is in the process of carrying out a detailed study to this effect, PowerGrid Chairman S K Chaturvedi told Business Standard.

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PowerGrid has about 150,000 power transmission towers and about 70 per cent of these are located in semi-urban and rural areas.

With the Indian telecom industry adding 14-15 million subscribers monthly and the entry of new operators, companies are looking to share infrastructure and save costs. A telecom tower costs about Rs 10-15 lakh.

The Chairman, however, declined to specify any revenue projections from the proposed business stream.

PowerGrid diversified into the telecom sector about four years earlier. It offers end-to-end leasing of bandwidth to telecom operators, through its overhead transmission infrastructure. It has a fibre-optic network of 20,000 km. By the end of the XIth Plan (2012), the company is likely to have a network length of close to 30,000 km.

With annual revenue of Rs 150 crore from telecom services, it has Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Tata Teleservices, Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel among its customers.

The company has infrastructure in remote areas, including in the northeastern region, Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. It holds Infrastructure Provider-I (IP-I) and Internet Service Provider Category-A (ISP-A) licences. In July 2006, it acquired a National Long Distance licence, which enables it to offer its services to non-licensed service providers such as entities in the corporate, government and defence sectors.

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