The Department of Telecom has granted state-run telecom company BSNL licence for 20 years effective from February 29, 2020, to provide mobile, fixed-line, satellite and other communication services across India, including Delhi and Mumbai.
Another state-run PSU MTNL provides telecom services in Delhi and Mumbai and BSNL currently serves the rest of the country.
"The licence shall be valid for a period of 20 years from the effective date of this licence unless revoked...effective date of this licence shall be February 29, 2020," the agreement signed between BSNL and the DoT on December 10 said.
The government approved a long-pending plan of merging the 34-year-old loss-making telecom company Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited in October 2019.
According to the annexure of the agreement, BSNL has been authorised to cover "local areas served by Delhi, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Noida and Gurgaon telephone exchanges" and also "local areas served by Mumbai, New Mumbai and Kalyan Telephone exchanges''.
Both BSNL and MTNL have been synchronising their operations since 2012. MTNL started providing basic telecom service in 1986 in Delhi and Mumbai. The government granted MTNL licence to provide mobile services in October 1997.
MTNL has 33.37 lakh mobile and 30.3 lakh landline customers while BSNL mobile subscriber base stood at 11.88 crore and landline customer base was 77.4 lakh at the end of September 2020.
(Published 11 December 2020, 14:40 IST)
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