As the government moves ahead with the proposal to merge Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL), a forum of employee associations of BSNL has urged the government to resolve legacy issues such as those related to business sustainability, human resources (HR), salaries mismatch and pension before going ahead with the merger.
The statement from the employee associations follows the government’s renewed focus to merge both its telecom operators in order to rationalise their costs and give competition to the private players.
“We are of the view that overburdening BSNL with further liability in the name of taking over operations of MTNL will not be a prudent move unless the government takes care of the gap in revenue and expenditure for a minimum period of 10 years and indemnifies BSNL against any such loss,” the forum said in a letter to telecom minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, telecom secretary K Rajaraman and BSNL CMD PK Purwar.
“Despite the management’s version that none of the problems will be allowed to enter into BSNL, we are very much sure that underlying problems associated with the proposal which have been ignored… shall definitely make things more complex unless it is suitably taken care of,” the forum added.
While the merger process is expected to take some years, the proposal is to merge the operational business of MTNL with BSNL . These include MTNL’s telecom businesses — wireline, wireless and enterprise business — along with operational assets. MTNL will be first delisted from the foreign stock exchange market and later from India’s stock exchanges as per the plan.
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Currently, salaries of MTNL employees are understood to be 10-20% higher than the employees of BSNL. One of the major demand of BSNL’s staff is that their salaries need to be at par with MTNL peers.
“We the associations of BSNL are of the view that as representative of employees, such cold hearted treatment of lowering the scale of pay, degrading the status of employees, freezing their increment in salary should not be allowed at all. Hence, we oppose this merger on such retrograde terms and instead feel that BSNL executives’ pay and pension should be brought at par with MTNL,” the forum said.
Apart from the disparity in pay, the forum also highlighted other HR issues like lower staff strength for BSNL on key projects, extension of superannuation benefits, and implementation of higher pay revision commission.
A merger between BSNL and MTNL is also crucial given the fact that the former is currently not present in Delhi and Mumbai areas. The employee unions also argue that given the status of MTNL’s financial health, it will be beneficial for BSNL to start a new network instead of acquiring the MTNL’s network to provide services.
With regard to the plan of merger, MTNL will be divided in three parts — MTNL operations along with staff and operational assets, second would be other assets and liabilities, including the spectrum held by MTNL, and the third will be operations of Mahanagar Telephone Mauritius (MTML) which is operationally profitable, according to sources. Further, there will be no liabilities of MTNL to BSNL, according to the plan.
“Sufficient spectrum must be ensured for running the operations smoothly across all the applicable bands. All assets should be handed over to BSNL except those needed for taking care of the liability by the government,” the forum said, adding that the government should form a joint committee consisting of management’s representatives and associations and unions representatives from both the organisations.
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In July last year, the government approved the revival package of Rs 1.64 trillion for BSNL and MTNL. In the Cabinet note, the government had said that it would form a committee of secretaries from different ministries to decide on the merger of the two companies. In August last year, BSNL had also formed an internal committee to look into the aspects of the merger.
“The committee for merger of MTNL and BSNL has been formed many months back and despite our repeated requests to have deliberation with representatives of employees before finalisation of any such proposal, no such deliberations were ever held with representatives of any union or association on this,” the forum said.