The bids for BSNL mobile net work tender was opened on Saturday, 4th February 2012. The Chinese manufacture companies, ZTE and Huawei are the lowest tenders. The lowest bid is $ 50 ( about Rs. 2500) for a line. The 14.3 million tender will be for about $ 71o million as per the bid.
The earlier tenders for 45 million lines (2007), 93 million lines (2010) and 5.5 million lines (2011) were all cancelled on one or another reason. It has resulted in acute shortage of mobile equipments/lines for BSNL which restricted its expansion crucially and gave a big berth to the private telecom companies like Bharti Airtel, Reliance, Vodafone etc. to increase their expansion and market share.
Let us hope that this tender also does not have the same fate as earlier tenders.The JAC has been putting much pressure for early tender to ensure expansion and it has helped for this tender. Will the government intervene in the last moment on some plea or other again to stop the tender to stop the expansion of BSNL? We have to be careful and watch the developments. I spoke to Shri R.K.Upadhyay, CMD, BSNL and requested for early further action for finalising the tender and issuing purchase order.
VAN Namboodiri's Blog 
It is most likely that again the bogie of security concern will be raised to prevent the Chinese bidders and also to further weaken BSNL. However, it should be remembered that only these Chinese companies (not the western MNCs) had earlier expressed their willingness to share their Source Code Data with Indian authority to address Indian security requirements. Let’s be vigilant to ensure that the vested interests could not kill the BSNL’s network augmentation programme this time also.