BSNL losing revenue for dearth of GSM equipment

Kolkata, Jun 24: BSNL is losing huge revenue in its mobile phone service for the past 15 months due to non-procurement of 45.5 million GSM equipment, alleged Sanchar Nigam Executives' Association (SNEA).

During the last 15 months the country witnessed an average of 50 lakh cellular connections every month, of which Hutch and Airtel provided more than 15 lakh connections each, an SNEA statement said, adding that BSNL, the government-owned mobile service provider, had to struggle hard to provide two to three lakh connections each month. BSNL, one of the six main telecom operators in the mobile sector, had to compete with private players like Hutch, Idea, Airtel, Reliance and Tata.

To cope with the growing market demand and increasing competition, BSNL had planned to float a global tender for purchasing of 45.5 million GSM lines of 2G/3G in March 2006 and was expected to be finalsed by November last.

However, when M/S Motorola was declared ineligible in technical bidding for not meeting certain critria of tender clause like having exprience of providing 20 million GSM connection, the compnay obtained a stay from Delhi High court in October last. But the order was vacated on April 16, and more than two months elapsed the BSNL management has shown no interest to resolve the deadlock resulting further slide of its revenue and business. BSNL now relegeted to 3rd position among the mobile phone companies, the SNEA leaders said.

SNEA leaders Tapas Bose, Dilip Saha and Rupam Sen in a joint news conference on Saturday said BSNL had huge opportunity to meet the growing demand in substantial numbers, perhaps could have even outpaced Airtel and Hutch if the existing capacity had not got exhausted and the placement of the "Purchase Order" had been done on time.

They alleged the system got plague due to lack of committment and indifferent attitude of the managment as well as the government.

To focus the current position in the BSNL and to put pressure on the managment to purchase equiptment for augmentation of GSM lines, the SNEA has decided to launch peaceful agitation from June 25 to June 29 across the country. The SNEA commands support of 35,000 executives among total 50,000 such officers in the BSNL. They said BSNL's some 3 lakh employees were facing uncertainty due to stoppage of growth of the compnay for past one-and-half-decade and increasing volume of busienss of private mobile serviced providers, though they hiered services of the BSNL.

Illustrating on a data, the SNEA said how BSNL got relegated to third position in the GSM sector. For example Hutchison Essar (HEL), a UK-based compnay, Vodaphone has recently acquired majority stake, has surpassed BSNL, by recording a growth of 5.4 per cent in its subsribers base, during May 2007, with the addition of 1.5 million lines, compared to BSNL's 0.24 million dueing the same period. HEL has over 29.2 million subscribers and a market share of 22.36 per cent in the GSM space as of may 07, against 27.9 million and 21.43 per cent respectively, for BSNL.

BSNL has also displaced to fourth postion as a cellular operator in terms of combined growth of (CDMA+GSM), with Bharti airtel (40.7 million user base), Reliance Communications (30.5 million user base ) and HEL (29.2d million user base), occupying first, second and third postitions respectively.

They said from Monday onwards they will launch a protest during lunch hours till June 28 and on the following day there will be a full-day protest, however, with no disruption of work.

UNI