Siddharth Zarabi: Wait, don't disconnect

BACKSTAGE

The Chairman and Managing Director of BSNL, AK Sinha, does not come across as daring as one of his predecessor's Prithipal Singh who started the company's cellular service at a time when few gave it a chance, and grew it to the country's largest today. But Sinha's tenure has been equally eventful. Though he was reluctant to implement Communications Minister Dayanidhi Maran's One India plan a few months ago, it was this that triggered off the latest round of long distance tariff cuts by competitors. Since the One India plan did not attract too many subscribers, possibly because the rentals were too high, Sinha made up for this last week by lowering the rates further.

Sinha's other big challenge is to get his mammoth $ 6 billion mobile network expansion plan off the ground since this is where the action is. While 5-6 million mobile subscribers get added each month across different operators, BSNL suffers from huge capacity constraints and its mobile connections even sell in the black market. Thanks to procedural or other problems, the project has now got stuck with one of the bidders, Motorola, alleging foul play "" while Motorola was edged out on technical grounds, the reasons for this were never explained to the company.

The going for this former lecturer at Bihar Engineering College in Patna, who's spent 37 years in the Indian Telecommunication Service, isn't going to be that easy. BSNL is the country's largest telecom player and it has the highest paid up capital (Rs 5,000 crore) of any PSU, but it remain a quintessential sarkari office, though you wouldn't get that feeling seeing its BSNL corporate office in the capital's Statesman House on Barakhamba Road.

Not all the blame, of course, can be laid at Sinha's door. For one, being a government company, it cannot even decide on HR policies for its four lakh strong employee base, and as the PMO's letter to Maran indicates, it doesn't have too much of a free hand when it comes to awarding contracts either. Being a PSU also ensures everyone is free to take pot shots at BSNL "" when was the last time any supplier alleged foul play in the tenders floated by a Reliance or an Airtel?

Nevertheless, Sinha has managed to keep the show running "" BSNL has done well on many fronts even at a time when it is losing fixed line users to "technology" churn. When he demits office next March, he will leave a company that continues to face the challenges that it had at the time he took over. In that sense, history will remember his stint for having carried the flag the way it was in the past.