Revive BSNL

The country's connector is now a days struggling to survive thanks to the actions of the past govts. in collusion with private telecom operators. It was not allowed to upgrade itself and stand a breast at least with the newcomers. The present minister Hon. Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad ji has taken some initiatives to revive this old horse. However, the action needs to be taken on a war footing. The equipment needs to be not only updated and overhauled its manpower also needs to be trained appropriately.
It is a pity that BSNL does not communicate with its consumers online. For everything one has to run from this to that office. It maintains several offices even it a small city and no office answers everything that a consumer is concerned. In fact it lacks every thing when it comes to a dialogue with its consumers. Therefore the foremost requirement is to create online portal where a consumer can request for all types of complaints and ensure that they are attended. At the moment only fault complaints are registered.

BSNL provides land line, broadband and mobile services to ordinary citizens. Since the advent of mobile phone land line users have switched to mobile phones and surrendered it. This was mainly because of the poor services of BSNL. It also offers broadband services over which it had some monopoly for a limited period but it has also been overtaken by the mobile phones.

To attract customers back to land line BSNL can think of offering a good broadband service otherwise it will continue to loose customers. A suitably priced land line-cum broad band package offering about 5 Gb of data download at a minimum speed of 2 Mbps might help otherwise as soon as 4G is rolled out over the country BSNL will become a symbolic.

Recently BSNL offered a higher speed of Broadband to some of its users but this was similar to applying salt on the burnt skin. The download was limited to 1 GB. This is of no use. Even the most conservative user requires 2.5 GB for his mobile phone only. The 2G speeds offered are a mere 25 kbps and 3G of BSNL does not work. 3G service offered is so much intermittant that the mobile phone keeps on searching the operator throughout draining the battery.

In the mobile telephony also BSNL looses customers for several reasons in addition to poor service. While services needs enough improvements its plans also need to be revamped. For eg. BSNL tries to collect revenue indirectly by validity extension plans. A few mobile operators also follow BSNL. This is one of the most fool hardy approach. Logically a number once allotted should be a permanent property of the customer unless surrendered. An option to impose some penalty for not using at least once a month could have been thought of instead of collecting revenue by validity extension. I have an Airtel connection that I took in 2005 and it is valid until 2029. BSNL's customer care centres are ill informed and also do not have any level of competence to solve the customer issues. The bell keeps on ringing with a preloaded message until you are tired and hang up. There are many issues that need to be mentioned.

I will request our Information and Broadcasting Minister to kindly look into the weakness of the BSNL and help revive it. more