NEW
DELHI: Jayanta Kumar was a harried customer of BSNL. A resident of
Ghaziabad in the National Capital Region, he had been running from
pillar to post just to get a bill for his landline and broadband
connection, which was not delivered for six months. "
Finally, I had to use my contacts to prompt them in generating a bill. Is this how you do business?" says Kumar, who discontinued his BSNL connection and hopped on to a private operator.
It's a sorry state of affairs at the telecom PSU that once was the backbone of the country's telecom infrastructure. The company has been in losses for the last many years. It appears to be stuck in a time warp as failure to keep pace with the highly competitive private operators and a general lackluster attitude of ground-level and managerial staff has seen its share in mobile subscribers narrow down to single digit, while Bharti AirtelBSE 1.63 % has moved ahead and gained the top spot in broadband, according to numbers released by regulator Trai.
BSNL's share in the mobile phone market came down to 8.6% in 2014 against 11.6% in 2012. This happened even when the overall mobile subscriber base had grown from nearly 865 million in 2012 to 944 million at the end of last year. BSNL had losses of around Rs 7,000 crore in 2013-14.
The situation is alarming as the fall comes at a time when the landline market, a bread-and-butter category for BSNL, has been going down due to rapid growth in the mobile phone segment. Private operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea CellularBSE 1.36 % have made the most of the Indian mobile revolution as they boosted their subscriber base and market share, many a times at the cost of the PSU.
BSNL old-timers blame the flight of customers to private players due to poor network quality brought on by delays in procurement of equipment. While BSNL's current CMD Anupam Shrivastava is hopeful of a turnaround on the back of a "renewed focus" after the entry of the Modi government, not everyone is happy with the present situation.
R K Upadhyay, former CMD of BSNL, said he is surprised by the fall in the company's market share as most of the network expansion had been done. "We have network capacity and coverage to support growth. So, it is difficult to justify the fall in numbers," he told TOI.
Asked about the poor last-mile services, he did concede that the attitude of ground-level and managerial staff needs to change. "There is a PSU hangover, and I cannot deny this. However, unlike the private operators, we cannot outsource our functions. With technology advancement, some of our existing staff may not be relevant today, but we cannot abandon them. They need to be paid till they serve."
Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has listed the turnaround of BSNL and MTNL as one of his key priority areas, though this seems to be a tough challenge.
Finally, I had to use my contacts to prompt them in generating a bill. Is this how you do business?" says Kumar, who discontinued his BSNL connection and hopped on to a private operator.
It's a sorry state of affairs at the telecom PSU that once was the backbone of the country's telecom infrastructure. The company has been in losses for the last many years. It appears to be stuck in a time warp as failure to keep pace with the highly competitive private operators and a general lackluster attitude of ground-level and managerial staff has seen its share in mobile subscribers narrow down to single digit, while Bharti AirtelBSE 1.63 % has moved ahead and gained the top spot in broadband, according to numbers released by regulator Trai.
BSNL's share in the mobile phone market came down to 8.6% in 2014 against 11.6% in 2012. This happened even when the overall mobile subscriber base had grown from nearly 865 million in 2012 to 944 million at the end of last year. BSNL had losses of around Rs 7,000 crore in 2013-14.
The situation is alarming as the fall comes at a time when the landline market, a bread-and-butter category for BSNL, has been going down due to rapid growth in the mobile phone segment. Private operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea CellularBSE 1.36 % have made the most of the Indian mobile revolution as they boosted their subscriber base and market share, many a times at the cost of the PSU.
BSNL old-timers blame the flight of customers to private players due to poor network quality brought on by delays in procurement of equipment. While BSNL's current CMD Anupam Shrivastava is hopeful of a turnaround on the back of a "renewed focus" after the entry of the Modi government, not everyone is happy with the present situation.
R K Upadhyay, former CMD of BSNL, said he is surprised by the fall in the company's market share as most of the network expansion had been done. "We have network capacity and coverage to support growth. So, it is difficult to justify the fall in numbers," he told TOI.
Asked about the poor last-mile services, he did concede that the attitude of ground-level and managerial staff needs to change. "There is a PSU hangover, and I cannot deny this. However, unlike the private operators, we cannot outsource our functions. With technology advancement, some of our existing staff may not be relevant today, but we cannot abandon them. They need to be paid till they serve."
Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has listed the turnaround of BSNL and MTNL as one of his key priority areas, though this seems to be a tough challenge.
