New Delhi: Accusing the Congress of treating PSU telecom companies like BSNL and BBNL like "cash cows" when it was in power, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw asked the Opposition MPs to introspect why 4G and 5G technologies were not allocated to BSNL.
Speaking in Rajya Sabha, the Union Minister on Friday said that BSNL and BBNL have been merged with each other and the resulting joint network is playing a key role in adding more than 1 lakh connections in villages in every month.
"The combined network of the BSNL and the BBNL is adding more than one lakh household connections every month, providing good bandwidth and good connectivity. Today, the data consumption in these connections is close to 120 GB per month," said Vaishnaw.
"This new model where we have taken local village entrepreneurs on board, making sure the village economy grows, is very good and progressing very rapidly and in the coming months, you will see the results," he added.
The Union Minister said that the reason behind the merger of BBNL with BSNL was not that the former was a failure, but the step was taken to reducer the friction between the two and ensure that harmonized development of broadband happens.
The Minister took a veiled dig at Congress saying that BSNL and MTNL were very healthy companies but between " 2004 and 2014, the kind of treatment meted out to these companies by people sitting in the opposition benches now, who treated them like cash cows. The manner in which these companies were destroyed -- there are many examples.
Vaishnaw said that in 2019 the first package of Rs 70,000 crore was given to the BSNL and it came in operating profit adding that in July, another package of Rs 1.64 lakh crore was given to the BSNL and this is very significant.
He also said that earlier India was dependent on foreign countries for the latest technologies in the telecom sector but now, 4G and 5G would be rolled out by these companies soon. "Gone are the days when you saw PSU companies differently. Today, they are being developed and are growing," he added.
He also said that 15 lakh kilometers of the unified network has been created by merging the BBNL and the BSNL adding that Gujarat is the first state in the country where the fiber network has reached all the villages.
