State-owned BSNL on Friday scrapped its controversial tender to add 93-million GSM lines that was expected to cost Rs 36,000 crore. Instead it has decided that it will adopt a new methodology for procurement- a managed service model-on the lines of private sector telecom players. Meanwhile if there is any delay in switching over to the new model, the company would make up the existing shortfall in its current line capacity by sourcing them from its current vendors.
The model has been suggested by Sam Pitroda, who recently submitted a 15-point reform agenda to turnaround the ailing company.
The BSNL board which met on Friday decided to scrap the tender since the same was advised by the Central Vigilance Commission, which had conducted an enquiry into the irregularities in its award followed by a decision on the same lines by Pitroda.
The board?s position was bolstered by notes submitted by two government directors earlier. The two directors in the company?s board, joint secretary in the department of telecommunications, JS Deepak and another DoT official P K Mittal also dissented with the board on the award of the tender citing high price and post-tender negotiations with the lowest bidder in contravention with the CVC guidelines.
FE was the first to report on the dissent by the two directors in its edition dated December 25, 2009. A day later FE was the first to report on the CVC enquiry into the matter.
The move comes as major setback for telecom minister A Raja who had vigorously batted for the tender and had even written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the wake of the CVC enquiry stating that corporate rivals were out to finish BSNL.
Later DoT had suddenly transferred one of the dissenting directors PK Mittal from DoT.
Commenting on the need for BSNL to shift to a new procurement system followed by private telecom operators, the Pitroda committee has said, ?Change procurements and procedures substantially to respond to rapidly changing technology and industry needs with necessary transparency, timeliness and accountability using schedules such as e-procurement.
In order to gain cost advantage and obviate technology risks BSNL should focus on minimising capital expenditure by pro-actively seeking and adopting service level agreement bound shared solutions for active and passive infrastructure needs.
Simultaneously BSNL should adopt managed services model for many of its operations such as network, IT and call centres and to ensure this carry out special consultations on a priority basis with the CVC?.
Currently, private players like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar outsource their network management to vendors.