BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 21 of 143

Correct — C, August 10, 2020. The project is the Chennai to Andaman and Nicobar Islands submarine optical fibre cable, and the Prime Minister's Office announced it in these words: 'Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi will inaugurate and dedicate to the Nation through video conferencing the submarine Optical Fibre Cable (OFC) connecting Chennai and Port Blair on 10th August, 2020.' The engineering behind that sentence is substantial. About 2,300 kilometres of cable were laid at a cost of roughly Rs 1,224 crore; besides the Chennai to Port Blair trunk, the cable connects Port Blair onward to seven islands — Swaraj Dweep, which is Havelock, along with Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Great Nicobar, Long Island and Rangat. It carries two times 200 gigabits per second between Chennai and Port Blair and two times 100 gigabits per second on the island links. The Government funded it through the Universal Service Obligation Fund under the Department of Telecommunications, BSNL executed it, and TCIL was the technical consultant. Why it mattered is the part worth remembering rather than the date alone. Until the cable opened, the islands' telecommunications ran over satellite, and the same official note records that 4G mobile services there 'were constrained due to limited backhaul bandwidth provided via satellite'. Replacing a narrow, high-latency satellite pipe with a fibre trunk is what put telemedicine, tele-education, e-commerce and outsourcing work within reach of the islands, and it is why a cable-laying project was launched by the Prime Minister at all.

• (a)August 10, 2019 — August 10, 2019 — the correct day and month with the year moved back by one, which makes it the most dangerous option on the list. The project does have a second real date attached to it, and a candidate who has half-remembered it may be reaching for that: the foundation stone was laid by the Prime Minister at Port Blair on 30 December 2018. Nothing of note happened to the CANI project in August 2019, and a cable that was still being laid could not have been dedicated to the nation.
• (b)August 15, 2022 — August 15, 2022 — a date built by attaching Independence Day to a plausible year. Big connectivity announcements are often associated with 15 August in a candidate's memory, and 2022 was also the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of independence, so the combination has a ring of importance. But the CANI cable was inaugurated on 10 August and by video conference, not from the Red Fort, and by August 2022 it had already been carrying traffic for two years.
• (d)January 26, 2023 — January 26, 2023 — Republic Day paired with a recent year, and the weakest option of the four. By January 2023 the submarine cable had been in service for nearly two and a half years. The option exists only to give the list a fourth national-day date, and any candidate who can place the project anywhere in the pandemic period will discard it immediately.

Almost all long-distance internet traffic in the world travels through submarine optical fibre cables rather than through satellites, and the reason is capacity and latency together. A fibre pair can carry hundreds of gigabits per second and a signal reaches the other end in milliseconds, while a geostationary satellite sits about 36,000 kilometres above the equator, so every hop up and down adds delay that no amount of bandwidth can remove. That is a nuisance for a web page and fatal for a video consultation with a doctor. Island territories are the hardest case, because they cannot be reached by terrestrial fibre at all, and until a cable is laid they are stuck with satellite backhaul that is expensive, limited and shared. The CANI cable solved exactly that problem for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Its funding route is worth knowing separately, because it recurs across rural and remote connectivity schemes: the Universal Service Obligation Fund, built from a levy on telecom operators' revenue and administered by the Department of Telecommunications, is the standing instrument by which India pays for connectivity in places where no commercial operator would build.

The four options divide into two pairs, and seeing that structure is most of the work. Options (a) and (c) share the day and month, 10 August, and differ only in the year; options (b) and (d) attach the event to a national day, 15 August or 26 January. National days are almost always decoys on infrastructure questions, because inaugurations are scheduled around readiness rather than around the calendar, and both of these can be set aside quickly. That leaves 2019 against 2020, and the anchor is the pandemic. The event was conducted by video conferencing, which places it firmly in the period when public gatherings were not being held, and 2020 rather than 2019 follows. If the year still will not come, use the other end: the foundation stone was laid at Port Blair on 30 December 2018, and a submarine cable of 2,300 kilometres is not laid and commissioned in seven months. BPSC's habit here is worth naming — it likes to build the wrong options for an infrastructure question out of the project's own second date, so learn foundation-stone and inauguration dates as a pair rather than singly.

• The Prime Minister inaugurated and dedicated the Chennai to Port Blair submarine optical fibre cable to the nation by video conference on 10 August 2020; the foundation stone had been laid by him at Port Blair on 30 December 2018.
• About 2,300 kilometres of submarine optical fibre cable were laid at a cost of roughly Rs 1,224 crore.
• Besides Chennai to Port Blair, the cable connects Port Blair to seven islands — Swaraj Dweep (Havelock), Little Andaman, Car Nicobar, Kamorta, Great Nicobar, Long Island and Rangat.
• Capacity is 2 x 200 Gbps between Chennai and Port Blair and 2 x 100 Gbps between Port Blair and the other islands.
• The project was funded by the Government of India through the Universal Service Obligation Fund under the Department of Telecommunications, executed by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, with Telecommunications Consultants India Limited as technical consultants.
• Before the cable, the islands depended on satellite backhaul; the official announcement noted that 4G mobile services there 'were constrained due to limited backhaul bandwidth provided via satellite'.

• Confusing the foundation-stone date with the inauguration date. The foundation stone was laid on 30 December 2018 and the cable was dedicated on 10 August 2020.
• Assuming a major national project must be inaugurated on a national day. Both 15 August and 26 January appear here as decoys; the actual date was 10 August.
• Thinking of the Andaman and Nicobar link as an internet cable only. Its immediate effect was on ordinary mobile telephony, because 4G there had been throttled by satellite backhaul.

BPSC asks infrastructure as an exact date attached to a named project, and builds the wrong options from that same project's other real date and from national holidays, so the safe preparation is to store foundation-stone date and inauguration date together for every project in the news. UPSC does not ask when a cable was switched on. It asks the physics or the policy instead — the principle on which optical fibre works, or what conditions define a geostationary telecommunications orbit — so the same project has to be revised once as a date and once as the technology it uses.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Chennai-Andaman and Nicobar Islands (CANI) submarine cable project was funded by the Government of India through

  • (a)the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund
  • (b)the Universal Service Obligation Fund
  • (c)the Consolidated Fund of the Union Territory
  • (d)external commercial borrowing from the Asian Development Bank

  Answer(b) the Universal Service Obligation Fund, under the Department of Telecommunications. BSNL executed the project and TCIL acted as technical consultants.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  An optical fibre transmits light along its length principally by

  • (a)diffraction
  • (b)total internal reflection
  • (c)polarisation
  • (d)interference

  Answer(b) total internal reflection — light striking the boundary between the denser core and the rarer cladding beyond the critical angle is reflected entirely back into the core, so it travels the length of the fibre with very little loss.