BSNL rejigging organisation to walk with time

State-run telecom player Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is in the process of undertaking an organisational and human resource (HR) restructuring in the company, in a bid to adapt with the changing times. This will also enable the public sector undertaking (PSU) to save over Rs 1,000 crore on an annual basis, once the new structure is put in place.

BSNL had hired Deloitte Consultancy for formulating the new structure, which was approved by the BSNL board recently.

“We are revamping our HR structure to conform to the latest business trends. Until now, our HR was becoming bureaucratic with little emphasis on targets and achievements,” BSNL’s chairman and managing director Anupam Shrivastava told Business Standard.

Under the new structure, new business centers — a group of many districts — will be set up that will be responsible for meeting targets as well as profit and loss of that particular area. Also, under the new business centres, operations such as HR, financial system and planning will be merged while day-to-day functioning will be left to the district areas only.

“This will allow synergy of operations and enable us to save costs of around Rs 1,000 crore annually. It will also bring in more efficiency,” Shrivastava said. The pilot has already started in Gujarat and Orissa circles and will be taken to other circles very soon.

The PSU, running into losses, is also aggressively focusing on revamping their sales and marketing team. “We will hire professionals at mid-management level to improve our marketing team. We will also hire management trainees in this segment,” he added.

Currently, BSNL has a total employee base of 2,30,000, out of which only 25,000 are dedicated to marketing and sales. All these steps are part of a revival plan that the government is undertaking to bring BSNL back into profits.

It is also exploring South Africa region for expansion and generating additional stream of revenues. The firm has sent one of its board of directors to South Africa to explore business opportunities for overseas expansion. BSNL has also written to all government telecom operators of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to express interest in their telecom market and work mutually to find a business opportunity.

Since its inception in 2000, BSNL recorded its first loss at over Rs 1,800 crore in 2009-10. It had a record profit of over Rs 10,000 crore in 2007-08. Last year, BSNL losses were around Rs 7,600 crore and in the previous year, it was Rs 8,000 crore. BSNL has been making losses mainly from deprecation of assets and administrative costs, which account for 55 per cent of the total revenues.

“The losses have already started coming down slowly. And we expect BSNL accounts to be back in shape by 2018-19 and start making profits. We plan to invest Rs 39,000 crore in the next five years, where a major chunk will go towards data side. 2015 is going to be a watershed year for BSNL,” Shrivastava said.

Currently, the mobile services contribute Rs 13,500 crore, out of which 10 per cent — Rs 1,350 crore comes from the data segment and is consistently rising for BSNL. From broadband services, BSNL earn Rs 7,500 crore. The firm expects revenues from combined data and broadband services to at least double to Rs 15,000-16,000 crore in the next two to three years.