This news rocks!

Everyday, We look forward to some news in our newspapers which will keep us engaged in laughter for the whole day. Something that caught my eye today is from The Hindu, Now, designer uniforms for Chennai Telephones employees

The article went on to say that the designer uniforms would give BSNL a corporate edge and that it would give employees a sense of identiy.

My humble request to the BSNL honchos (who think uniforms could solve the attitude problem of their employees) is to first put in place robust technology, train the people (meaning, the employees) properly and then give them the freedom to experiment (with people and products).

My Blood Pressure shoots up everytime I call the BSNL Dataone helpline. We expect some cogent words from people sitting in a helpline, but most of the times I have called them, they are at loss for words or they put me on hold for a long time and "search" for words... Being a nascent service, I understand that there would be more enquiries and so they have to juggle with all, but One thing I know is that the questions we ask are not rocket science or nano-technology based and also that they would have been trained to answer all these questions.

Another issue with BSNL is that of their CellOne cellular service (I don't subscribe to it, and I would never do that mistake in the future too!) but have been witness to many a faults of CellOne and also many a pranks the network plays. We placed two CellOne mobiles nearby and tried calling one from the other. Guess what? "The subscriber is out of network". This was outrageous! BSNL also claims they have network in nook and corner of the country and to some extent, they have put up towers along the highways too. But, what if they haven't increased their capacity? Without additional capacity increase, it is as good as not having the network at all!

BSNL has to get more freedom (in terms of decision making at policy and financial issues) from the clutches of DoT. DoT and the Communications minister treat BSNL as their offsprings and so the PSU has to dance to the whims and fancies of the ministry and the department. In the recent days, the powers of the telecom regulator TRAI is also being curtailed slowly so that the ministry could take decisions on its own. This leads to a disastrous situation and nullifies the fact for which a regulator was put in place! ET strongly condemned this act of diluting the regulator in its Editorial through For Regulation, Not ministerial whimsy
If it may not appear that I am stressing an often repeated phrase, I would like to say that BSNL has to go to the markets. It has been estimated that total value of BSNL would be around $30 billion and it could be still more if a proper valuation is undertaken. Assuming BSNL to be valued at $30 - $40 billion, if Government intends to sell even 5% of the shares, it could mop up close to $2 billion dollars which could be utilised for so many developmental purposes (With a committed PM, FM, Montek and many other concerned oldies, I am pretty sure that the money would not be wasted). But, such a decision could be taken after multi-levels of meetings and talks and by then any damn thing could have happened!! It happens only in India!!