Editorial – March 2022

The government has given tremendous support and enough chances to BSNL for it to engineer its revival. But to what avail? BSNL CMD PK Purwar who is also the CMD for MTNL wants more. And it is not a small amount. He wants a large amount of Rs 26,000 crore to clear MTNL’s debt and he says that without this even God Almighty cannot revive the company. Such has been his statement before the Parliamentary Standing Committee. In October 2019, a bailout package of Rs 69,000 crore was given for MTNL/BSNL. In FY 22, both claimed to have achieved operational profits (exclusive of interest on loans). The government’s plan was to merge MTNL into BSNL and wipe out the loans through asset monetisation over a period of four years. But Mr Purwar resisted this as he did not want MTNL’s liability to be taken over by BSNL. Asset monetisation also was not happening. As a result, the government had to provision an additional Rs 44,720 crore package, in the FY23 Budget. Now this new demand has been made.

The other pet project of the government – BharatNet is also missing targets. Rs 30,885 crore has been spent on this till January 31, 2022. The project was earlier called the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) under the UPA-II government and was intended to lay optical fiber cable (OFC) connecting all the 250,000 gram panchayats (GP) of the country. It had a completion target of 2.5 lakh gram panchayats by March 2014. But as with most things of the UPA regime, there was a policy paralysis and nothing moved.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked DoT to treat this a ‘super priority’ project. However, the results will not please the PM. Latest figures available on BBNL web site reveal ‘fiber connected and equipment installed’ and ‘Service Ready’ GPs statuses and they are falling short of the target by a big margin. Also it is to be seen how many of these ‘Service Ready’ GPs are actually working.

Usage too is insignificant. 4,029 TB was used as of February 2022, including 53,353 WiFi hotspots, and 214,174 FTTH connections. The translates to 3.35 lakh consumers of 12 GB each, every month. Since low usage is considered a function of unreliable OFC, in June 2021, BBNL put its created infrastructure on sale through PPP mode, the centre chipped in with a viability gap fund. There were no takers. Thereafter, BBNL assets and businesses were merged in BSNL and it has been tasked with service rollouts. A tall order for a company that is struggling for months with a 4G launch and if at all it is launched, may end in a whimper.