The declining market share of public sector telecom major BSNL has been arrested and is set to cross 10 per cent, Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad informed the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

The Minister was replying to a supplementary question by Congress leader K C Venugopal who wanted to know what the Centre was doing to improve service quality by BSNL, whose market share was declining while that of private telecom majors was growing.

Blaming the UPA government for the decline in BSNL’s market share, Prasad said: “We have arrested that (decline) trend. From 9.36 per cent (2014), it has become 9.43 per cent till December 2015. When the final audited figure of March 2015 will come, we will cross 10 per cent. I am telling you, there is 4.1 per cent revenue jump. The operating profit is ₹ 672 crore. Therefore, all this would lead to a reclaiming of the market share.”

In the Minister’s reply, read out by Venugopal, the performance of BSNL’s market share as on March 31, 2014 was 12.88 per cent, which had declined to 9.36 per cent as on March 31, 2015, and in the current year, the market share was 9.43 per cent. Prasad also made it clear that the Centre had no plan to merge BSNL and MTNL “as of now” and both the organisations were trying their best to generate maximum revenues for revival.

He said BSNL’s income from services had increased by 4.16 per cent in 2014-15 at ₹27,242 crore against ₹26,153 crore in 2013-14. “BSNL has earned an operating profit of ₹672 crore in 2014-15. The operating profit is likely to be much higher during 2015-16. The net losses for 2015-16 are expected to be reduced by 20 per cent compared with 2014-15,” the Minister added.

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