BSNL to clear February salaries of employees today
15 Mar 2019
With cash provided by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) said it would be clearing all February salaries due to employees today (Friday) itself.
"BSNL will pay salary of all employees by tomorrow. We are thankful to telecom minister Manoj Sinha for his timely intervention to ensure that salaries of employees are paid at the earliest," BSNL chairman and managing director Anupam Shrivastava said on Thursday.
The CMD said that DoT helped BSNL with Presidential Sanction to meet working capital of the company and a letter of comfort for the same was issued to the company on Wednesday.
"We will serve letter of comfort to bank tomorrow following which they will start processing amount of Rs3,500 crore to working capital requirement of BSNL," Shrivastava said.
"Minister took lead and directly monitoring situation to resolve the crisis. I am also thankful to BSNL employees who ensured that the services are running," Shrivastava said.
Besides, he said, revenue receipt of BSNL, which is usually higher in March as also internal accruals have started flowing in and that it would be in a better position now.
"We expect total accruals of Rs2,700 crore in March of which Rs850 crore will be used for salary disbursement," Shrivastava said.
He said that with support of DoT there will be no delay in salary disbursement in coming months.
He also said that BSNL is the only player, apart from Reliance Jio, which is adding new subscribers that has lead to higher revenue accruals.
BSNL and MTNL have surplus staff and are facing problems in clearing workers' salaries. BSNL has 1.76 lakh employees across India and MTNL has around 22,000. It is estimated that 16,000 MTNL employees and 50 per cent of BSNL employees will retire in the next 5-6 years.