Two days back the organisers of the 4th South Asian Telecom Employees’ Unions Council Meeting contacted me and invited me to attend the Meeting to be held at Kathmandu on 20-21 December 2011. Though at very short notice I agreed to attend after the Director, Kun Wardana Abyoto made a personal request.   I was also asked to present a report on the Telecom Scenario in India.

I shall leave for Kathmandu by the evening of 19th (tomorrow) and will return by the night of 21st December.

It seems that the case against the former Finance minister P.Chidambaram is thickening with the self evidence of Janata party President Subramania Swamy’s deposition in the Delhi Special Court in connection with the case filed by him in 2G scam. He has alleged that both former Communications Minister Raja and former Finance Minister Chidambaram were in active connivance in taking decision to fix the entry fee and spectrum charges in 2008 at the 2001 rates and allow Swan Telecom and Unitech Wieless to offload shares to Etisalat and Telenor before the roll out os services.

Even earlier, the role of the former Finance minster has been raised in the Parliament by the opposition. Prime Minister’s role also may be questioned.

It is good that the Delhi government has issued  orders to pay wages of labours through checques only. This is being done to avoid exploitation, underpayment and corruption. I appreciate this order.

BSNL management has also issued orders that the payment is to be made by cheques or in the Bank in the account of the worker. But who is implementing. Despite bringing the facts to the top management several times, it is not taking any interest to get its own orders got implemented by the field level officers.  If the management was sincere, it could have settled the issue quickly.

It is once again revealed that the private companies are doing their business by utilising the money of the public in various ways. One method is selling the shares. The easy method is to take loans from the banks or pressurise the banks to take shares. This method is maximum used in pumping funds to the private telecom sector. It is reported that as on June 2011, the loans etc. from the banks to the private telecom industry is more than Rs. 94,319 crore. From the State Bank of India (SBI) alone an amount of Rs. 23,000 crore has been exposed to the private telecom companies. It is to be noted that there are only about a dozen telecom companies, meaning that the loans etc. are thousands of crore.

What will happen if some of these companies fail and lose their money. Naturally it will not be owners of the companies but the banks and people who deposited their hard earned  money in the banks.  They may be bailed out by the government also.

Private companies are the blue eyed boys of the government. They will be given all bail-outs. BSNL and MTNL are PSU companies. They are government companies  for which the bail-out is not in the agenda of the government.

It seems surprising that even after the TRAI, DOT, TERM etc. has clearly spelt out that the 3G roaming service being provided by the private telecom companies Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, in circles where they have not bid for auction of the spectrum is illegal and violation of the licence conditions, the government is not prepared to take any action. It is dilly-dallying with the matter to find out an excuse route for the companies. The COAI,  the organisation of these companies have demanded the government that, if they are not allowed to roaming as being provided as now, they should be returned their auction free. The Prime Minister a few days ago at the meeting of the India Telecom assured that their concern will be attended to, meaning some bail out  will be made available.

I am completely opposed to the bailout. Instead,  these  penalty should be imposed on them, the Spectrum cancelled and penal action taken against them for cheating the government and the nation. Pressure should be mounted upon the government for the same.

The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters have been demonstrating against the  high 1% who holds all the wealth of the country. In a similar way, it is now reported by CAG that 90% of the Income Tax arrears are due from only 12 individuals of high value. The total tax arrears amount of these 12 comes to a mind blogging Rs. 1,04,092.26 crore. The names of these tax evaders are given below:

1.  Hasan Ali Khan                             RS. 50,345.73 crore

2.  Harshad Mehta                             Rs.  15,944.38 crore

3.  Chandrika Tapuriah                     Rs.  20,540.83

4.   A.D.Narrotam                               Rs.    5,781.86

5.   Hiten P.Dalal                                 Rs.    4,200.o4

6.   Jyoti H. Mehta                               Rs.    1,739.57

7.   Aswin S.Mehta                               Rs.    1,595.51

8.   B.C.Dalal                                         Rs.    1,535.89

9.    S.Ramaswamy                               Rs.    1,122.48

10.  Uday M.Acharya                            Rs.       683.22

11. Kashinath Tapuriah                        Rs.       602.80

No one need hope that the Government will take any action against thsese tax evaders. There will some noise now and then and the issue will be closed. These big tax evaders havegot big connections.

Yesterday, BSNL CMD is stated to have told the media that the loss to BSNL is due to the huge wage bill to the extent of 46% and if VRS for one lakh employees is implemented it will save about Rs. 2400 crore annually, a 16% savings in wage bill. While giving his recommendations, Sam Pitroda has suggested a similar line. The government is also thinking on the same lines. Interestingly some of the workers also seem to be toeing the same line falling prey to the continuous pro-VRS campaign by the management and the media.

What is the truth and what are the facts? It is not the number of employees which is responsible for the loss. When there were about 3.5 lakh workers  during the period 2001 to 2007, BSNL was earning profit from Rs. 3,000 to 10,000 crore. Now only there are about 2,76,000 including ITS and Group A officers. About 75,000 workers are less.

The percentage of the wage bill to the revenue has increased mainly due to the reduction in the revenues. Due to the cancellation of procurement of equipments, the anti-PSU policy of the government and the utter inefficiency of the top management, the revenue of the company has been continuously declining. It happened mainly after the cancellation of the tender of 45 million mobile equipments in 2007 by the BSNL Board.  The revenue reduced from Rs. 40,176 in 2005-06   to Rs 39715 in 2006-2007,  to Rs.38046 in 2007-08  to Rs. 812 in 2008-2009,  to Rs. 32,045 in 2009-10, and  then to Rs.29,687 in 2010-2011. If the revenue has increased or at least was maintained at the 2006-2007level, then the % of wage will have been almost stagnant.

Who is responsible for the loss of revenue. While the operational charges have been increasing, why the revenue has not gone up? It is the callous attitude of the top management, who are mainly ITS officers, who are only deputationists and are not stake holders of the company. There was about Rs. 40,000 surplus cash in the banks, but they failed to utilise it for expansion purposes. Equipments like cables, broadband modem, telephone instruments etc. which were very essential for development and expansion were not purchased. marketing was a complete failure. The top management sat in their offices without any consideration of the expansion of business. As leaders they utterly failed to take the workers with them. They took all benefits and conveniences by spending the funds of the company, like purchasing costly cars, taking membership in the costly clubs, travelling in the First class on foreign tours ( which is 16 times charge of the economic class) even one or to weeks before retirement,  staying in star hotels in domestic tours instead of in BSNL IQs which are cheap, conducting conferences of Circle heads, district heads, TAC  etc. in star hotels, taking all kinds of allowances like tea allowance, newspaper allowance, LTC in helicopters, looting in the name of Temporary advances, hiring of large number of cars without any benefit to the company, avoidable modification of buildings costing crores of rupees, renting buildings for offices while there were large number of  available BSNL buildings etc. costing BSNL unnecessary expenditure of thousands of crores of rupees. The hundreds of top-level officers joining the rival private telcos immediately after their retirement shows the standard of their integrity to say the least. Somebody pointed out that some of the top officers were getting salary from BSNL for working, at the same time they were getting money from private companies for not working.  Indeed, BSNL rose up to the first three in corruption at all India level. Are the ordinary workers responsible for all these? They are the same workers who got more revenue for the company all these years. Instead of accepting the  responsibility for the decline of the revenue which is entirely due to them, the top management wants to sent out the employees out of the company to cover their failure. For what? To prepare for the privatisation of the company.

There are many other points against VRS, but it can be stated later. As seen above, it is not the salary bill of the employees but the decline in revenue is the reason for the loss. The government or management has no plan to increase the revenue. It is only trying to reduce the expenditure on wage bill, which is a direct attack on the workers. By the way, the ratio of the wages of the top management officer and the worker at the lowest scale has increased from 6-7 % to 10-15%.

Let us expose the vicious propaganda being spread by the management and tell the facts to the workers.

Today I got the opportunity to interact with one of the top telecom union leaders of Bangladesh. In the morning, I got a call from Brother Md.Mozammel Haque Siddikki, Joint Secretary General of the Bangladesh T&T Sramik Karmachari Federal Union – CBA, stating that he is in Delhi and would like to meet me. Accordingly, I went to the Hotel Surya in the New Friends Colony to meet him. We had interaction for about two hours over a cup of tea or rather two cups of tea.

Brother Siddikki  has come to Delhi as part of a team of the Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) to have some discussions with the managements of BSNL and MTNL on certain important issues. He is a Sub-Asst. Engineer, in BTCL.  The team held discussions with the MTNL and BSNL on 15th December.

Just like in India, the Telecommunications Department in Bangladesh was corporatised, but in to three corporations. One is  BTCL, which is the landline company. Another company is the Bangladesh Submarine Cable co. Ltd, which is a cable company. And the third is the Teletalk Bangladesh Lt. which is the mobile company. In the BTCL there are about 10,000 regular employees and about 4000 casual employees. He was interested to know how the pension of the BSNL absorbed employees is stipulated. I told him about the Rule-37A as well as the pension revision of pre-2006 absorbees, achieved through sustained struggles. Other issues also were discussed. We agreed to be continuous contact and co-ordination.

It was a pleasant meeting. I hope the connection between BSNLEU and the Bangladesh Union will continue.

Today morning I got a call from Comrade Kun Wardana Abyoto, Director of Telecom & IBITS Sector, UNI Apro inviting me to attend the 4th South Asian Employees’ Unions Council Meeting at Kathmandu on 20th and 21st  December. Although the invitation was in the last-minute, I agreed to attend since the co-ordination of Telecom Unions world over is an important matter. He sent me a mail with details also.

Hence I will be leaving for Kathmandu in the evening of 19th and will return by the night of 21st.  It will be an opportunity to hear about the situation in other countries and also to inform the situation in India to them.