SRINAGAR: Suspension of telecom and internet services in Jammu & Kashmir for several months since August 5 last year caused the government-owned BSNL to suffer losses of up to 100 crore.
Public Relations Officer for BSNL, Masood Bala, told Kashmir Reader that the company suffered losses in all its verticals in Jammu and Kashmir, which was among the top ten states of revenue generation for the company.
“We have 20,000 full-time broadband connections which generate a minimum revenue of Rs 14 crore a month. There are about 1.5 lakh post-paid connections which contribute 18 crore, while 4.5 lakh post-paid connections contribute at least a crore a month. We also have steady revenue coming from landline connections. Since nothing was working in the past months, we suffered losses on all these counts,” Bala said.
Bala said the bulk of the losses was caused by suspension of broadband internet service, which he called the bread and butter of the company. He said the company was unable to resume broadband internet service, while other service providers were successful in doing so, because it had been working on installing the necessary firewall for preventing access to banned websites for nearly a month when the government decided to remove the ban.
“We have now resumed broadband internet and are working on making our services better, but losses that have been suffered are impossible to recover, given the cut-throat competition in the market and despite the addition of over 10,000 landline subscribers in the past month,” he said.
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai’s) data, the number of BSNL telecom subscribers in Jammu & Kashmir was 1.21 million, among the total of 11.5 million subscribers.
At present the markets are dominated by JIO, followed by Airtel and Vodafone-Idea.

Junaid Nabi Bazaz