People's Democracy

BSNL & PRIVATE TELECOMS

Is There Really a Level Playing Field between Them?

 P Asokababu

THE private telecom operators have always been demanding a level playing field, to compete on par with the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), a public sector telecom operator. The meaning is that the BSNL should be treated on par with a private telecom operator and any concession not given to private operators should not  be given to the BSNL either. The Indo-US CEO Forum is a body created through an understanding between the Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh and the then US president George Bush in 2006 and consisting of big capitalists of the two countries. It has also demanded of the Indian government to see that the competition between the private sector and public sector operators in the telecom sector in India is free and fair. It is thus clear that not only the Indian big capitalists, the big capitalists of the advanced capitalist countries like the USA, England, France etc are also pressurising the government of India that it must not extend any concession to the public sector operator, the BSNL, in case such concessions are not given to the private operators. 

MOOT

QUESTION

But the question is: Should the government of India extend an equal treatment to the private operators if they are not carrying out any social responsibilities as the public sector operators have been doing? The fact is that the private operators have never come forward to fulfil any social responsibilities. Instead, they have violated the conditions stipulated in their license to fulfil certain social responsibilities. In the past, for example, the private operators did not fulfil the condition of providing 10 per cent of their landlines in the rural areas. Instead, they preferred to pay a meagre penalty for violating the condition.

Here is a telltale case. On August 6 this year, there was torrential rain, floods and mudslide in Leh in the state of Jammu & Kashmir. People in Leh faced a havoc. To help them, it was absolutely necessary to restore the communication links that had been disrupted. But the private telecom operators did not offer adequate support for the people of Leh by restoring the communication links. They did not come forward to fulfil this vital social responsibility of theirs. So much so that their attitude was condemned by no less a person than the minister of state for communications, Sachin Pilot. On the other hand, the minister praised the BSNL. He told that that BSNL had made all-out efforts to restore the basic communication network in the region within 24 hours of the flood havoc. It immediately arranged 35 satellite mobile phones.

While the BSNL is maintaining an enormous landline network spread throughout the country which it inherited from the Department of Communications (DoT), and is incurring losses in the process, the private operators are mostly concentrating on the profitable mobile telephony and maintaining landlines only in urban areas where there is some profit. The landline network the BSNL alone is maintaining while incurring losses is, however, not any kind of wastage. It is a valuable national asset and it has to be fully utilised for making the broadband internet service available through out the country and to make our society a knowledge society.

Recently, in Rajya Sabha, the CPI(M) member of parliament, Smt Brinda Karat, asked a question: whether it was a fact that while private telecom companies were procuring telecom equipments from Chinese vendors, the BSNL was barred from procuring the equipments from the same Chinese companies on the ground of security concerns? To this question, Sachin Pilot replied that in the interest of national security, the government had directed the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited in May 2009 that equipments should not be procured from the Chinese vendors for deployment in the sensitive regions of Assam, Manipur, Tripura, Sikkim, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Maharashtra. He further told that  participation of foreign companies in strategic sector has a bearing on national security. The BSNL being a public sector undertaking, its network has to be relied upon in emergency.

However, because of this sheer discrimination against the BSNL, it could not procure the GSM equipment necessary for expanding its mobile customer base and hence its share in the mobile services market has declined. Thus it is a proven fact that because the BSNL is shouldering the social responsibility and catering to the responsibility of national security, its share in the market has declined compared to the private operators who do not have any such social responsibility. It is another matter that after insisting on certain safeguards for the Chinese equipment vendors, the government allowed the BSNL too to procure equipment from the Chinese vendors. But by that time the BSNL had lost a good share of its valuable market because of the prohibition.

DECLINE IN BSNL’S

MARKET SHARE

It is also to be noted that the BSNL is one of the largest employers in the country with three lakh employees and implementing reservation in jobs for the SC, ST and OBC sections of the population, thus catering to the requirement of social justice. But the private operators are only exploiting the labour to the hilt. At the top level in the management, they are paying 10 to 15 crores or more per annum as salary whereas their regular employment is minimal. They have outsourced all their work of network installation and maintenance to the private agencies (both Indian and foreign) who are getting the work done by temporary employees at very low wages and without any trade union rights and labour law. For example, a person who comes to the house of a subscriber on behalf of the Airtel, with an Airtel badge, to instal a broadband connection is not an employee of the Airtel but an employee of the franchisee of Ericsson Company with a monthly salary of around Rs 15,000 but without any social security like the EPF. Nor are the private operators implementing reservations in the jobs. Thus while the public sector operator, BSNL, is carrying out the social responsibility of providing employment and reservations, the private operators are providing only minimal employment and temporary employment, violating all labour laws and without implementing reservations for the backward sections of the society.

Thus it is clear that without carrying out the social responsibilities on par with the public sector operators, the private sector telecom operators (both Indian and their foreign collaborators) have been demanding of and pressurising the government that it must not extend any concession to the public sector operators if such a concession is not given them. Coming under their pressure, the government and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have abolished the ADC being paid by the private operators to the BSNL for incurring losses on account of maintaining the landlines and also stopped the reimbursement of license fee to the BSNL, even though such stoppage is a violation of the New Telecom Policy 1999.

It is because the BSNL has been carrying out such social responsibilities, while incurring losses but without getting any compensation from the government, that it faced a loss of Rs 1800 crore in 2009-10. Yet the government is running a malicious propaganda campaign that this loss is due to the wage revision arrears paid to the employees! The policies of the government of India, which are being implemented due to the pressure exerted by the big Indian capitalists and their foreign collaborators, have resulted in an intentional sabotage of the prospects of improvement in the BSNL’s share in the market. The government is applying several breaks in the timely procurement of the equipment required for expanding the services and denying it the justified compensation for the losses incurred on account of its social responsibility. At the same time, there is the mismanagement by the ITS officers who refuse to be absorbed in the BSNL for years together. All these have resulted in a steep decline in the market share of BSNL and the first time posting of loss in the balance sheet of BSNL.

PRIVATISATION

GAMEPLAN

After thus intentionally damaging the BSNL’s development, the government appointed the Sam Pitroda committee to recommend how to improve the BSNL, which is nothing but a cruel joke. In its turn, the Sam Pitroda committee recommended that the BSNL should work like a private company, should disinvest 30 per cent of its shares, bring in a strategic partner from the private sector, and get its top level managers from the private sector. The committee also recommended that the BSNL must remove one lakh employees through the voluntary retirement scheme (VRS) and transfer routes and create a subsidiary company in collaboration with a real estate company for utilising its valuable vacant lands (25 lakh square metres in seven big cities). Another suggestion was that it must procure equipment through managed services method, i.e. by handing over the entire work of installation and maintenance of the network to private  vendors etc. This is nothing but a heinous gameplan to privatise the BSNL in quick instalments and hand over the valuable national assets of the BSNL at throw-away price to the Indian big capitalists and their foreign collaborators. 

It is in such a situation that all the trade unions and associations of non-executives and executives in the BSNL have come together under the banner of Joint Action Committee and are fighting against this conspiracy. After a series of protest actions in the last few years, they have now decided to go on a three-day strike from October 19 to 21 coming. In this struggle, moreover, they have requested for support from all the democratic and progressive forces in the country.