Maran provided ISDN lines to SUN TV for free: CBI report

The telecom ministry has been sitting tight for 44 months on a Central Bureau of Investigation letter recommending action against DMK leader Dayanidhi Maran – formerly telecom minister and currently the union textiles minister – for the blatant subversion of telephone facilities, according to an Indian Express report.

The report says Maran got the state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) to connect 323 telephone lines to his home in Chennai where he had none. Moreover, he got all these lines listed not in his name but in the name of the chief general manager, BSNL Chennai. These lines virtually constituted a telephone exchange in the minister's home.

Further, Maran got the BSNL to secretly lay a separate and exclusive underground cable from his Boat Club home to the office of his brother Kalanidhi's SUN TV network. This means that a 3.4-km cable was laid below public roads for the Maran's exclusive use. Of course, no bills were paid on the use of these lines.

The Dayanidhi home exchange was operational in the SUN TV establishment for several months from January 2007 through the fraudulent cable connection from Dayanidhi's Boat Club home. They were no ordinary telephone lines, but costly ISDN lines, which can carry tons and tons of TV news and programmes faster than satellites to any part of the world.

These lines, the CBI says in its report, are ''normally used by medium to large commercial enterprises to meet special needs such as video conferencing, transmission of huge volume of digital data of audio and video'' – precisely the facilities that SUN TV would need for its telecasting operations. For this, the SUN TV would have paid huge cost. But it got it all free, at government's cost.

The Maran home exchange, says the CBI, was ''programmed in such a way that no one other than the authorised BSNL staff were aware of the existence of such an exchange created for his [Maran's] exclusive use''.

The CBI wrote to the telecom secretary on 10 September 2007 recommending action against Maran for the fraud. But the action would have had to be taken by A Raja, also a DMK man, who was then the telecom minister. Raja has since been jailed in connection with the 2G scam; and Maran too is under the scanner in the case.

Since then, the CBI letter is presumably gathering dust somewhere in the telecom ministry; while Maran continues to be a senior member of the union government.