Don’t dial this merger’, July 27 is not very convincing. Of course there will be issues relating to the merger of both BSNL and MTNL, but there are tremendous synergies as well. Today, the best-paying customers are in metro areas and the big growth is coming from non-metro areas. For any mobile phone company, both are important. So far, however, BSNL had one type of customer and MTNL had only the other. So it is good for both of them to merge. Merely citing operational difficulties or different salary structures is not good enough reason to oppose the merger. If this was so, then firms like Bharti would never have grown — a very large part of Bharti’s expansion was through the takeover of existing firms operating in different states.
The writer is, though, on firmer ground when he talks of the vagaries of policy affecting BSNL’s fortunes and of various court cases that prevent it from expanding — these are issues that do not affect private sector firms and if the government is serious about doing business, it needs to find a way out of the current mess.
N Kumar, on email
