KOLKATA: The Digital India project, which aims at delivering the gamut of government services through cell phone applications, could provide a lifeline to struggling state-run telecom companies Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) by way of a near Rs 92,000 crore annual revenue opportunity by 2020.
MTNL has proposed the formation of a separate 50:50 joint venture with BSNL for jointly delivering citizen services across India at a flat rate of Rs 25 per transaction on a nomination basis in internal presentations to telecom secretary Rakesh Garg that ET has seen.
MTNL and BSNL have approached the telecom department (DoT) to deliver citizen services on a nomination basis to skirt potential challenges posed by the tendering route, especially since both are chronically loss-making companies and may not meet eligibility criteria.
BSNL and MTNL have an infrastructure-sharing pact for providing joint services to companies that can be widened to deliver citizen-centric services nationally, the MTNL official added.
The ambitious revenue outlook is based on an estimated 10 crore citizen service transactions a day by 2020 from 1 crore a day now once the Digital India initiative gains traction, said an MTNL director aware of these presentations.
MTNL and BSNL have approached the telecom department (DoT) to deliver citizen services on a nomination basis to skirt potential challenges posed by the tendering route, especially since both are chronically loss-making companies and may not meet eligibility criteria.
MTNL runs telecom services in Delhi and Mumbai while BSNL offers telecom coverage in the rest of India. A top BSNL executive declined to share specifics but said the Digitial India initiative would prise open fresh revenue streams. He also agreed that the project rollout would be "much faster and at lower costs" if MTNL and BSNL combined forces and converted their idle landline exchanges into data centres. Leveraging these potential data centres across India is also aimed at developing a centralised platform for testing and hosting diverse citizen-centric applications generated by third-party content developers.
The MTNL and BSNL joint plan to develop a pan-India, app-hosting platform comes within days of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India chairman Rahul Khullar exhorting the government to focus on promoting the development of multi-lingual applications for effective realisation of the Rs 1.13 lakh-crore Digital India project's goals spanned across the health, education, banking, public to social services verticals. Over the past decade, BSNL has lost 40% of its wireline subscribers while MTNL has barely managed to hold on to its 3.5 million landline customers. As a result, "nearly 50% of combined 48,000-plus landline exchanges are idle and can be converted into pan-India data centres at a modest cost to meet Digital India's services rollout targets", said the top MTNL executive quoted above. In its presentation to DoT, MTNL suggested that the combined property holdings of both telecom PSUs could be deployed to preserve physical versions of digitised records necessary for effective delivery of services.
MTNL and BSNL share assets such as buildings, mobile masts and international long-distance phone networks to service mostly enterprise customers. The latest developments come at a time when the Narendra Modi government is trying to revive MTNL and BSNL, which continue to suffer hefty losses.MTNL posted a Rs 733.2 crore net loss in the first quarter to June 30, while BSNL incurred a Rs 7,085 crore loss in 2013-14.