Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) earns money through leasing out telecom infrastructure to private telecom operators. In fact, since FY20, barring one year, BSNL has received more than Rs 1,000 crore in revenues from leasing mobile towers to private telcos. Reliance Jio leases most of the towers from BSNL. This allows private telecom operators to reach more areas faster with their services at a lower cost.
In FY24, BSNL received Rs 1,055.80 crore in total from the operators for leasing out its infrastructure. The same was only Rs 30.73 crore in FY11. This is a good source of income for the telecom operator. Amongst the private telecom operators, Reliance Jio has leased 8,408 towers from BSNL, while Vodafone Idea (Vi), and Bharti Airtel have leased 1,568 and 2,415 towers from BSNL.
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As of March 31, 2024, BSNL had 67,340 mobile towers across India, said Pemmasani Chandra Sekhar, minister of state for communications and rural development. Out of this, the state-run telecom operator has leased 12,502 towers to the private telcos, state-government police, MTNL, and more.
"The mobile and landline services provided by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) are working satisfactorily and meeting most of the Quality of Service (QoS) parameters as per Performance Monitoring Report (PMR) of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)," the minister told Lok Sabha in a written reply.
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Reliance Jio is contributing the maximum to this revenue as being the largest telecom operator in the country, it has leased out more than 2/3rds of the towers that BSNL has leased. BSNL is also upgrading its telecom infrastructure throughout India with equipment from Tejas Networks to launch 4G. The state-run telecom operator is expected to launch 4G in 1 lakh sites by June 2025, an ambitious target.
