BSNL landline services in Delhi, Mumbai from Mar 1
State-ownedbharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) will start providing landline services in New Delhi and Mumbai from March 1.
While Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) provides telecom services in Delhi and Mumbai, BSNL serves the rest of the country. BSNL was supposed to start these services on behalf of MTNL from January 1, but was unable to do so due to some internal issues between the two companies.
“Now, BSNL has agreed to go ahead with these services. There were technology issues between the two companies and those were causing delays,” an official said without divulging further details.
In December, the Department of Telecom granted BSNL the licence for 20 years effective from February 29, 2020, to provide mobile, fixed-line, satellite, and other communication services across India, including Delhi and Mumbai.
BSNL has been authorised to cover “local areas served by Delhi, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Noida, and Gurugram telephone exchanges” and also “local areas served by Mumbai, New Mumbai, and Kalyan Telephone exchanges”.
The government in October 2019 approved a longpending plan of merging the two loss-making telecom companies.
On October 24, 2019, the Union Cabinet approved a ~68,751-crore revival package for loss-making BSNL and MTNL, including 4G spectrum allocation and voluntary retirement scheme, as well as their merger.
The Cabinet also approved merger of the two telecom companies and indicated that till the merger process is complete, MTNL will operate as a subsidiary of BSNL.
The package included raising of ~15,000 crore sovereign bonds to meet the immediate capital requirement of both the companies, 4G spectrum allocation worth ~20,140 crore, ~29,937 crore for Voluntary Retirement Scheme covering 50 per cent of their employees, and ~3,674 crore for goods and services tax that will be levied on allocation of radiowaves.
According to the official figures, over 92,000 employees of both the companies had availed of the VRS package — over 78,000 employees of BSNL and over 14000 employees of MTNL.
Earlier, BSNL’S workforce stood at 150,000 and that of MTNL at 22,000. Both BSNL and MTNL have been synchronising their operations since 2012.
MTNL started providing basic telecom service in 1986 in Delhi and Mumbai. The government granted MTNL licence to provide mobile services in October 1997.
MTNL has 3.37 million mobile and 3 million landline customers while BSNL mobile subscriber base stood at 118.88 million and landline customer base was 7.74 million at the end of October 2020, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s latest subscription data.