Employees promoting rival companies?-Times of India

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited employees promoting rival cos?

Sachin Dravekar, TNN Apr 26, 2012, 07.29AM IST



NAGPUR: Are employees of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) busy promoting broadband and landline services offered by rival telecom companies?
Sources have told TOI that executives of the public sector telecom operator have started advising customers to switch over to private operators for uninterrupted and better services.

"BSNL has been making tall claims about extending its broadband services to every part of the city without any problem but it has failed to attend to hundreds of complaints regarding poor connectivity," said a customer.
Two months ago, Ranjit Deshmukh (phone No. 2249653), a resident of Shivaji Nagar, lodged a complaint (1004547474788) regarding the non-functioning of both his landline and broadband connection. Since then, he has been running from pillar to post. He met officials of the customer service centre (CSC) and even the area manager. Interestingly, instead of attending to Deshmukh's complaint, a BSNL official advised him to switch over to a private operator.
"I called up the concerned officials many times. They told me that that they are unable to solve my problem because of a long-pending cable issue. They advised me to switch over to any private operator for reliable and better service," he said.
Deshmukh's is not the only case. Many among the 45,000-odd broadband subscribers can be seen regularly visiting the BSNL office at CTO compound.
Another subscriber, Madhav Soman from Ravi Nagar said that after several reminders, he has decided to discontinue BSNL and switch over to another operator.
The list of complainants is quite long. "After registering a complaint, I called up the BSNL office to get a feedback but what I got was a rude response from an official who said that the services have been hampered due to a major fault in the cable," said another subscriber.
BSNL's principal general manager Subhash Chandra Joshi admitted that services were hit twice in the last few months but have been normalized.
Joshi informed that BSNL has started commissioning equipment with a capacity of 20,000 lines and broadband services through the optical fibre network having capacity of over 8000 lines. Nagpur BSNL will soon increase its entire capacity to 75,000 lines, Joshi added.
A senior BSNL official attributed complaints regarding poor broadband and landline services in many areas to old cable lines. Most of the time cables got damaged when other agencies like Nagpur Municipal Corporation and MSEDCL undertook works like road repairing or digging. Cable thefts too have added to the problem, he said.