According to a report published in the Deccan Herald, the BSNL board approved three out of 10 suggestions by the board set up by the government.

BSNL has about eight lakh route km of fibre infrastructure across India compared with Reliance Jio with 4.78 lakh route km (including 178,000 route km that it acquired from Reliance Communications) and Airtel’s 2.46 lakh route km and Vodafone Idea’s 1.56 lakh km, according to estimates.

Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has given a letter of comfort to the cash-starved BSNL for raising loans, which is a guarantee from the government.

On the other hand, BSNL will clear salary dues of around Rs 850 crore by March 20 from its internal accruals. Both companies have failed to pay salaries of their employees for last month, according to employees' representatives.

This is the first instance of the company defaulting on salary payments underlining the tough times for it ahead.

According to sources, the Digital Communications Commission (DCC), the highest decision-making body of the DoT, will discuss various options to revive the sick telecom firms.

The direction to the company - which had accumulated losses of Rs 31,287 crore at the end of 2017-18 - was given following a meeting of top BSNL officials with telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan, sources told TOI.

With all the taken a toll cutting exercices put together, the company has been able to spare Rs 2,500 crore final year and a comparative sum is anticipated to be spared within the continuous fiscal.

“We are going to ask companies to deploy networks with advanced equipment so as to take care of WiFi calls wherein BSNL can provide bandwidth on a revenuesharing model,” BSNL chairman Anupam Shrivastava told ET.