The Hindu : BSNL's massive expansion plan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 29, 2004

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Business

BSNL's massive expansion plan

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, JAN. 28. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has chalked out massive expansion plans to install equipment to support an additional ten million GSM connections in the next one year. The tentative expenditure for this has been put around Rs. 10,000 crores, according to S. D. Saxena, Director (Finance).

Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, he said BSNL was already number one cellular provider in the country with a subscriber base of 50 lakhs. In the shorter term (5-6 months) it is investing another Rs. 3,000 crores to create additional capacity of 25 lakh connections. Most of the Rs. 13,000 crore investment will be met from internal accruals. Of the ten million additional capacity to be created, 10.5 lakh cellular lines will be in Andhra Pradesh.

Now that unified licences were being permitted for cellular and CDMA connections, the board of BSNL was discussing the issue. However it was estimated that BSNL would need to pay a whopping Rs. 2,500 crores for all circles. Therefore it may adopt a `selective' approach and go in for unified licences in some circles only, he said. A decision was likely in 3-4 months on the first batch of circles for which they might seek a unified licence. Mr. Saxena said reports have come from some parts of the country of a shortage of SIM cards for BSNL connections, and that they were being sold at a premium. The problem of shortage would be overcome within a month, he assured. On the `poor quality' of services in some `pockets', he assured that they would be improved over the next few months.

Mr. Saxena said BSNL was introducing `India Telephone Card (ITC)', which would offer special concessional calling rates to people going to pilgrim centres such as Tirupati and Sabarimalai. Similarly, it is now offering a special package for Haj pilgrims, which offers a 25 per cent concession in ISD tariff for calls to Saudi Arabia. Special facilities offered include setting up of free telephone at airport terminals handling Haj pilgrims. The concessional tariff is also applicable to ISD calls from PCOs, cellular and WLL phones.

In Andhra Pradesh, BSNL was working on a special scheme for providing 3,000 cellular connections to Andhra Pradesh Police at Rs. 300 a month rental with Virtual Private Network (VPN) free facility, which would enable police personnel to speak within their group, virtually free of cost, he said.

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