he last fiscal proved once again that MTNL is definitely a profit making company. It had a net profit of Rs 1,297 crore, a margin of 25.8 percent, in 1998-99. And in the last fiscal, it increased it to Rs 1,693 crore, a margin of 32.6 percent. Last fiscal, its turnover was Rs 5,385.9 crore, a growth of 7.02 percent over the previous fiscal. It has more than 300 km of optical fibre cables in both Delhi and Mumbai, and a telephone system with total switching capacity of at least 20 lakh lines each in the two cities. No doubt that private companies will take years to get even near to what MTNL already has.

MTNL has also performed reasonably well in terms of providing telephone connections. Both Delhi and Mumbai today have a teledensity of more than 15 percent. This is commendable, considering that the national teledensity is roughly 2.6.

It is only when you start seeing MTNL from a historical perspective that you start wondering whether this monopoly deserves the "mini navratna" status it enjoys.

MTNL was born in 1986, which is more than a decade ago. Is just 15 percent of Delhi and Mumbai’s population capable of owning a phone? Till couple of years ago, MTNL did not provide value-added facilities like ISDN, toll-free services, virtual calling cards, and
Virtual Private Network (VPN). Also, it was just last year that MTNL started its own Internet services. Despite its huge telephone subscriber base, MTNL has not been able to convert a large number of them as Internet subscribers. Though it tried introducing a radio phone service some years back, in which it failed, MTNL came to believe in the real potential of cellular mobile phone services only a few years back. Worse, it is still struggling to get it operational. Its history is even worse when it comes to providing dedicated links to corporates. Customers complain that MTNL does not have the term "quality of service" in its dictionary.

It may not agree that it has a forgettable past. But certainly, most critics agree that MTNL has benefited the most from the competitive atmosphere that ensued from privatization of telecommunications. The cellular services provided by the metro operators was a big eye opener to the importance of having an efficient customer care infrastructure and on being seen as a company rather than a government department. To a great extent, MTNL owes a lot to its outgoing chairman S Rajagopalan, who instilled a competitive spirit among his staff and did a major rehauling in terms of modernizing MTNL’s services. The Intilligent Network (in) services got deployed, services like Managed Data Network (MDN) services got operational, and the drive to digitize and optimize the network through optical networking and new transmission technologies like SDH got more intense. New services like Internet and cellular services were rightly marked as the services of the future.

MTNL, as it stands today, is clearly a company at crossroads. It is a company with a digital network going in for a listing on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and yet has the burden of carrying over six lakh employees into the New Economy. A company which talks of online bill payment and mobile bill collection vans and yet has the potential of holding the two metropolis on ransom by striking on the mere mention of privatization. The million dollar question is, will MTNL employees remain prisoners of yesterday or grow up to become millionaire stake holders?