Around 5,500 cellphone towers in Karnataka became illegal after the government’s Telecom Infrastructure Tower Regulations 2019, took effect recently.
Karnataka has announced that all the cellphone towers must be at least 50 meters away from schools, hospitals and religious buildings. The new regulation also says that if a telco wishes to erect a tower, it must follow this protocol while already established towers will have to shift their area to a different location that follows the norms. They will be given a period of three months’ time to change the tower’s location or else they will be considered violating the regulation and actions will be taken against them ; we learned as per sources.
Not just near hospitals, schools and places of beliefs but the erection of towers near residential areas, lakes, water tanks, lakes and rivers will also become hard for telecos as they have to adhere to what the guidelines state about erecting towers there.
In residential areas, the towers can only be installed in vacant lands and there must be minimum 3 meters of empty space around them. If there are no vacant lands nearby, the towers can be erected in the rooftops and should be positioned three meters away from the edge of the building.