BSNL employees charge DoT of favouring pvt operators

New Delhi, July 25 (PTI) An employee association of BSNL, which is reeling under severe financial pressure due to falling profits and market share, has charged the Department of Telecom for pursuing policies favouring private operators especially with regard to licence fee and spectrum charges.

BSNL is 100 per cent owned by the government under the Department of Telecom (DoT).
    
Sanchar Nigam Executives' Association, representing over three lakh employees, said that while all private operators pay licence fee computed on the adjusted gross revenue from telecom services only, BSNL has been forced to pay the licence fee based on non telecom revenues as well.
    
This, the Association said, could be due to over staying of some of senior officials in the DoT and their increased proximity with the private operators.
    
"This highly prejudiced and discriminatory treatment met out to BSNL by DoT even though inexplicable and incomprehensible could be largely attributed to overstaying of officers in the sensitive licencing wing of DoT in complete disregard of repeated instructions of DoP to shift officers dealing with sensitive issues beyond reasonable time span because of their proximity with vested interests," a representative of Sanchar Nigam Executives' Association told PTI.
    
BSNL had witnessed over Rs 10,000 crore net profit 3-4 years ago and now all these profits have been evaporated and the PSU is likely to report net losses for the last financial year.
    
Not only this, BSNL has been losing market share in the fast increasing mobile phone market vis-a-vis their counter parts in the private sector.
    
The issue relates to licensor, DoT, charging annual licence fees as percentage of Adjusted Gross Revenue by including revenues from various non telecom activities in the AGR.
    
This was challenged by private operators in TDSAT which gave an interim direction to exclude revenues earned fron non-telecom activities for calculating AGR. And the same was upheld by the apex court also.
    
The benefits of the interim stay has been passed on to private operators one by one but the same has been denied to BSNL, making PSU to pay higher licence fee every year.
    
"The repeated requests by BSNL to DoT to extend the benefits to the PSU have been turned down by the DoT," the Association claimed.
    
Similarly, the private operators also challenged the increase in usage charges for spectrum in TDSAT for which they got a stay order.
    
In this case also while the private operators are paying usage charges at existing rates, BSNL has been made to pay higher spectrum usage charges.