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Was BSNL KILLED by the Powerful people of India? : BSNL Tragedy Case Study
For the past 1.5 years, we have been hearing the news about Govt’s plans to shut down BSNL, and ever since we started following the news, we have always seen BSNL incurring 1000s of crores of losses every single year, infact in the past 10 years, BSNL has incurred a combined loss of more than 80,000cr. and considering the case of Air India and govt bureaucracy in general, we by default assume that BSNL is also one of the ill-run businesses that the govt just can’t handle isn’t it!! Well, guess what guys, in FY21 while the market went crazy to see Reliance jio generate a profit of Rs 12,537 crore, very few of us know that there was a time when BSNL generated a profit of 10,183cr! and from 2001–2008 Bsnl had generated a cumulative profit of 46668 Cr which was more than the next 3 telecom operators combined and that too in spite of all the subsidized schemes that it rolled out. and not just that it once had a market share of 70% and literally acted as the backbone of Indian telecommunication. So The question is What exactly went wrong with BSNL that it suddenly went from being a jewel of India to a sick company in less than a decade? Was it yet another govt mishandling or was it deliberately paralyzed by the private sector? and most importantly, as citizens of India, what are the lessons that we need to from the Tragic downfall of BSNL?