The city roads will be free of defunct overhead cables in 30 years at the current rate of progress of the teams removing them.

Dud cables have been removed from a stretch of Harish Mukhjerjee Road and some areas in Alipore over the past six days.

The area covered would be around 3km, said representatives of multi-system operators and broadband Internet service providers who have teamed up to remove dud cables from the roads in the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan on May 20.

In areas under the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, the combined length of the roads would be around 5,500km, said a senior official of the civic body.

Around a dozen MSOs and broadband service providers deployed teams that covered 3km in six days. At this rate, they would take 11,000 days, or a little over 30 years, to complete 5,500km.

Pedestrians are having to wriggle their way past cables hanging dangerously across the city roads every day, three weeks after the storm had struck. On Thursday, a mesh of loosely dangling cables — many of them touching the road — cut a sorry figure on a stretch of Dover Road. They are doubly dangerous in the dark, said a resident.

The Telegraph on Thursday published a picture of a senior citizen bending his back to get past low-hanging cables on Girish Avenue.

The prod to remove the dud cables came from Firhad Hakim, the chairman of the board of administrators of the CMC. Sources said Hakim called a virtual meeting with executive engineers on Thursday, stressing the need to clear the roads of cable and other debris as soon as possible.

He is also scheduled to meet MSOs and broadband players on Friday to take stock of the situation.

Civic officials have attributed the high count of electric poles felled by the cyclone to the weight of cables on them.

The storm had felled close to 4,500 posts and 15,000 trees, according to official estimates. Clearing the debris of foliage and cables is still on.

An MSO director summed up the challenge that awaited them. “Dus saal ka paap hai. Itni jaldi kaise dhulega (The sins of a decade cannot be washed away soon),” he said. Old cables that have long outlived their utility have been dangling from posts, all jumbled up, for years.

The teams started with Harish Mukherjee Road last Thursday. A large part of the road was made free of defunct cables before the teams switched to parts of Alipore, said MSO representatives. “While working, our men had inadvertently damaged some cables of DTH players. The police got involved and the work was hampered,” said an official of an MSO.

A section of the MSO workforce, depleted by the lockdown, is working to “normalise connections” at places where CMC teams are still removing trees and tilted posts, said an official of another MSO.