Baffled behemoth

Chennai: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) chairman and managing director Prithipal Singh and his team never played a game called competition, forget winning it. And, now, when private players not just play that sport but play it dirty, they are so baffled that they forget to even cry foul.

It's not just undercutting that Singh, an electrical engineering graduate, has to contend with, but also under-the-ground cable-cutting. Recently, BSNL-Chennai officials found 1,200 lines burnt in the Chamiers Road area, an upmarket commercial and residential district, and lines to a residential complex cut with blades.

While digging roads, damages are quite common. But at Chamiers Road a router was damaged and the cables were burnt, proving sabotage. The needle of suspicion, says a BSNL official, points towards competition. Not just that. State government officials, on their part, do not allow BSNL, formerly department of telecommunications, to expand its network by laying cables along the roads.

To make things worse, Chennai's roads have been potholed by three private basic-service providers — Bharti Telnet, Reliance Infocom and Tata Teleservices — and Bharti Telnet has commenced its operations recently. Even in Kerala, where supposedly anti-bourgeois communists rule the roost, the public sector BSNL was denied permission to lay cables, while a private player gleefully ploughed the city roads.

Singh, while questioning the need for competition, with the private players connecting just 7-8 lakh lines as against BSNL's 3.5 crore lines, says: "Even if the customer-access code system comes into effect, the additional features and services we will be introducing will keep our subscribers loyal to us."

But just that doesn't make Singh complacent. He has drawn up investment programmes to the tune of Rs 14,000 crore and is charting out plans for BSNL to foray into new areas like mobile and Internet telephony, video-on-demand, broadband connectivity, call centres and others.