BSNL Employees Say No To Tower Assets Sale

BSNL employees have opposed the Center's proposal to put the state-run telco's mobile towers on sale. The telco's employees' body has said that the government's move differs from the 2019 relief plan.

Private Companies the Sole Beneficiaries of Monetization - BSNL

Notably, the government has proposed to sell as many as 14,917 BSNL and MTNL towers. The state-run also owns around 68,000 tower sites in Delhi and Mumbai, from its MTNL business.

P Abhimanyu, General Secretary, BSNL Employee Union, told ETTelecom, "we are opposing this move (monetization) strongly. The sole beneficiaries will be private corporations only". Abhimanyu added that this move also represents a big roadblock to the telco's plans to launch 4G, as outlined by the relief package. The said relief package, approved in October 2019, saw both the PSU telcos allocated Rs 70,000 crore. The package included a voluntary retirement scheme, 4G spectrum allocation and assets monetization.

BSNL Employee Union has said that it will come out with a strategy to initiate countrywide protests; right now it is in discussions with associated groups. For now, it has planned a lunch-hour demonstration on Friday.

Abhimanyu also called the argument that the government will retain ownership of these assets "shallow". He further added that such a campaign serves as a first step towards a full-fledged privatization of BSNL and MTNL.

In the National Monetization Pipeline, the Narendra Modi government is also planning to sell state-funded 2.86-lakh kilometer of BharatNet's optic fiber network. This plan also includes the sale of 26,700 kilometers of national highway, 400 railway stations and 150 trains, and 42,300 circuit kilometers of power transmission lines and 8,000 kilometers of national gas pipeline.