BSNL Has No Money To Pay Salaries For 1.6 Lakh Employees; Salaries Upto 6 Months Delayed
BSNL has the lowest debt among all telecom companies.
Govt. owned telecom company BSNL is in dire straits. As per reports coming in, BSNL has no money to pay salaries to its employees, and for the last 3 months, workers haven’t received any salary.
This is a shame for DoT, whose responsibility is to disperse funds for BSNL.
Will Govt. respond and take action now?
BSNL Employees Not Getting Salaries
For the first time in 18 years, BSNL employees haven’t received any salary, which they are supposed to get at the end of the month.
Full-time BSNL employees haven’t received their salaries for the month of February, which they were supposed to get on February 28th.
On the other hand, contractual employees are in a worse situation: In some circles, contractual workers haven’t received their salaries for the last 3 months, and in some circles in UP, contractual workers haven’t received a penny since last 6 months.
BSNL’s corporate management has admitted that they don’t have cash to pay salaries.
This has been confirmed by Swapan Chakraborty of BSNL Employees’ Union, who said, “We were supposed to get the salaries on February 28 and we have not got it yet. More than that, as BSNL faces cash deficit, it is not able make all the bill payments,”
Why BSNL Is Not Able To Pay Salaries?
BSNL is reeling under debt, and they have no money. As per reports, they are gasping for fresh funds, but Govt is not allowing them to seek more loan.
As per DoT or Department of Telecom rules, BSNL is allowed to take loan only for capital expenditure. But salaries is not such an expense, hence, BSNL employees are not getting the salary.
Interestingly, BSNL has the lowest debt among all telcos, but still, their employees are being denied salaries.
BSNL has debt of Rs 13,900 crore, meanwhile Airtel has debt of Rs 1.13 lakh crore, and Vodafone has debt of Rs 1.2 lakh crore. The combined debt of Jio is Rs 2 lakh crore.
All Union and Associations in BSNL (AUAB) had planned protests after March 12th, but then they realized that BSNL services will be disrupted, hence canceled the protests.
But now, it seems that some sort of action will be taken.
Swapan said, “We have been raising our issues and protesting against these. Now, we will plan our further steps.”.
BSNL Will Fire Employees?
A panel tasked with reviving BSNL has suggested that more than 35,000 employees should be fired, VRS and other employee benefits be removed, and even suggested closure of the company, which was later denied.
Rs 5000 crore was saved by removing traditional employee benefits such as travel allowance and medical benefits.
It would be interesting to observe how BSNL revives itself, and more importantly, how they pay employee salaries.
We will keep you updated, as more details come in.
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