The Government owned BSNL is in the fry for the past couple of years due to the mounting losses and the inadequate service. The BSNL story has been doing rounds in the Media and in majority of articles the losses are stated wrongly. We decided to dive deep and pull out the exact facts that are contributing for the BSNL losses.
A document that was issued recently in a Rajya Sabha session when the reason behind the mounting losses was enquired threw some light on the issue. The Document shed some light on the revenue of BSNL for the past 5 years. It can be depicted that BSNL started going into losses in the 2009-2010 period and ever since it has not been able to bounce back positively.
Financial Year Profit/Loss after tax (in Rs Crores)
2004-05 10,183
2005-06 8,940
2006-07 7,806
2007-08 3,009
2008-09 575
2009-10 (-) 1,823
2010-11 (-) 6,384
2011-12 (-) 8,851
Negative Denotes Losses.
The Minister of Communications and Information Technology quotes that the decrease in Landline and the broadband connection has reduced the revenues. Other contributing factors include stiff competition from private operators and Employee expenses that exceed the industry norms.
The step taken by Government to revive BSNL includes a Financial Support of Rs.6724.51 Crores on surrender of Broadband Wireless access spectrum. Government will formulate a plan to coordinate and address higher employee expenses and a meaningful utilization of assets to facilitate availability of finances for network expansion and improving the Quality of the service
BSNL is also on verge of offering VRS (Voluntary Retirement Scheme) for employees so that they can cut the employee expenses. The VRS scheme will cover a total of 1 lakh employees. We feel that BSNL should completely revamped and can BSNL bounce back to good old days ? What do you think do let us know via comments.
