BSNL: India’s goal of being Atmanirbhar will require a pound of flesh

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), which was formed 20 years ago, has more than 12 crore customers – 10 per cent of all telecom subscribers in the country. In landline connections, it has nearly half of the two crore landline customers in India. Telecom may be lucrative business, but as a company BSNL has been bleeding. In 2019 BSNL reported a loss of more than Rs 13,000 crore. In fact the accumulated losses of BSNL and its older cousin the Mahanagar Telephones Nigam Limited (MTNL) are in excess of Rs 90,000 crore. Hence about one year ago, just after Diwali, the Government of India decided to merge the two entities, and approved a relief and revival package of Rs 70,000 crore. Of this nearly Rs 38,000 crore was to pay for a voluntary retirement scheme. By December nearly one lakh employees had decided to retire. This reduced BSNL’s workforce by half and MTNL’s by 80 per cent. You would think these people left a ghost town behind. The remaining money was meant for modernisation. Due to losses and paucity of funds, the BSNL had not invested in upgrading its copper cable to fibre optic, nor had it got itself 4G… Read full this story

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