MTNL will stay afloat even after service licence expires on April 6: DoT

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) will stay afloat even after its service licence expires on Saturday (April 6), the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is learnt to have told the state-owned firm.

The debt-laden company has to pay around Rs 11,000 crore for licence renewal and has written a series of letters to the DoT seeking a breather.

The company had said the tenure of the 20-year the licence should be calculated from January 11, 2001, as it started functioning as a full-fledged Delhi-NCR player from that date. “From April 1999 to January 2001, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Gurugram and Noida were not part of the licence agreement,” an MTNL official said.