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MTNL to invest Rs 2,284 cr to develop telecom infrastructure
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 14 August 2003, 19:30 IST
NEW DELHI: MTNL plans to invest Rs 2,284 crore this fiscal for developing telecom infrastructure, including CDMA network in the country, Rajya Sabha was informed on Thursday.
Announcing this, Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Ashok Pradhan said in a written reply that the main projects planned by MTNL include provision of 350,000 new connections by augmenting the net switching capacity by 400,000.
Also, it plans to provide new 50,000 trunk automatic exchange tandem lines, commission 200 digital line connections, replace 395,000 E-10B switches and commission 20,000 km optical fibre cable.
Pradhan said the MTNL has formulated a VRS for its group C' and `D' employees but the scheme is yet to be approved by the government.
The minister said cellular subscribers grew to over 1.51 crore by July 2003 against only 33,8665 in April 1997.
On whether government had recommended an alternative route of placing FII investment outside the existing sectoral cap, subject to overall cap of 74 per cent, Pradhan said a proposal to allow FII investment outside the sectoral cap was "at the discussion level only".
In reply to another question, he said the number of persoanl computers sold during 2002-03 were 22.9 lakh against 18.8 lakh in 2000-01.