Make it all or quits on bsnl & mtnl

Make it all or quits on bsnl & mtnl

Strategic dimension makes case for BharatTel.

The decision to revamp BSNL and MTNL and merge them deserves a huge but a conditional welcome. Telecom is a strategic capability, a critical infrastructure on which a great deal of business and financial transactions are carried out and whose vulnerability to hacking could prove crippling for the economy and for national security. High-speed, low-latency communications will enable a whole lot of innovation in the conduct of manufacturing, service delivery or real-time analysis of data by artificial intelligence to perform a range of operations.

India does have strong telecom service providers in the private sector, and regulation can mandate certain kinds of desirable behaviour on their part, true. However, on certain emergent occasions, it would be more secure and reliable to have a network that is directly accountable to the State, has a presence in remote areas and can act on a non-commercial basis. This is the rationale for retaining BSNL and MTNL. It makes sense to merge the two entities and to delist MTNL before the merger. For the sake of convenience, let us call the merged entity BharatTel. For BharatTel to make sense, it will have to be very different from both BSNL and MTNL in its operational culture, technological capability, consumer responsiveness and efficiency in the use of finance and manpower. Therefore, it makes sense to give voluntary retirement to not just those above 50 but to the entire staff and to hire new managers with a new work ethic and culture. Public sector enterprises have proved capable of running lean, mean operations, provided that attitude goes into their DNA at the moment of their founding, as has been the case with Concor or India’s space operations. If the government does not have the determination to reimagine BharatTel along these lines, it should merely wind up BSNL and MTNL.

India also needs a new public enterprise to carry out basic research in telecom and microelectronics, to create the autonomous capability that an aspiring great power must have in communications. C-DoT and C-DAC can be merged, to form the core of the new venture.