Group of Ministers discusses revival of BSNL, MTNL

Group of Ministers (GoM) led by Home Minister Amit Shah Tuesday discussed revival of loss making telecom firms BSNL and MTNL.

"The first meeting of GoM on revival of BSNL and MTNL was held on Tuesday evening," an official source told PTI without sharing any additional details.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Law and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad along with telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan, additional secretary Anshu Prakash and BSNL chairman and managing director PK Purwar are learnt to have attended the meeting.

This is the second time a GoM has been constituted for revival of the two ailing public sector firms.

The previous GoM was constituted under UPA 2 regime to address various pain points like refund of spectrum fee, pension proposal for 43,000 MTNL employees etc. of the BSNL and MTNL.

The loss making PSU telecom firms have approached the Department of Telecom for immediate help as they are facing financial stress, which has aggravated due to the tariff war triggered by the entry of Reliance Jio.

Further, high employee cost add to the woes of both the firms.

The employee cost of BSNL is 75.06 per cent and that of MTNL is 87.15 per cent of their total income, while the same for private telecom companies varies between 2.9 to 5 per cent.

BSNL and MTNL have also approached the government for granting voluntary retirement scheme package to their employees.