Daybreak - India spent $33 billion trying to fix BSNL. It forgot the most important part

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

India has pumped over $33 billion into BSNL since 2019. But the person running the company finds out every three months if they still have the job.Multiple candidates have been interviewed for the full-time position but no one has been hired yet.The finances have improved in the last two years but the telco's market position has kept sliding. And the decisions that actually matter — where to launch 5G, which markets to chase, what kind of company BSNL even wants to be — are all waiting on a leader who might not be around to see them through.So what happens to a $33 billion bet when no one's really in charge?Tune in to find out.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The Indian government has spent over $33 billion since 2019 trying to fix this one company. And the person who's running it only finds out whether they still have a job every three months. That is the situation at BSNL, India's state-owned telecom operator. And it tells you almost everything that you need to know about why the company's turn around is taking so long. Robert Charred Ravi has been the interim chairman and MD of BSNL for two years and in April this year he got his sixth extension, three months at a time like I told you. He is technically a civil servant, a deputy director general in the telecom department holding the CMD post as additional charge alongside his regular role.

He doesn't even actually meet the eligibility criteria for the full-time job. What makes this interesting is that in the same two-year stretch, BSNL added 100,000 mobile towers, expanded fixed broadband and nearly tripled its abeta. And yet, BSNL's market share shrunk to just a little over 7% in the financial year 2026. Of its 93 million subscribers, only 56% are active. At Airtel for comparison, that number is 99%.

So here is the tension. The finances are improving, but the market position is eroding. And the person steering this ship only has a quarter of a year as runway. They themselves have no certainty about what comes next. BSNL is clearly at a crossroads. What kind of a company does it want to be? Who does it want to serve? And can it survive without taxpayers' money propping it up indefinitely?

In this episode, we will look at what happens when a company this consequential is run by someone who can only think as far as the next extension. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host Nick Da Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Friday, the 29th of May. The Public Enterprises Selection Board has interviewed a bunch of candidates for the CMD role since the previous head, P.K. Perwar, vacated his post in July 2024. Nobody has been selected so far.

You see, BSNL is a mini-Ratna company, which means that hiring involves shortlisting rounds, interviews, vigilance checks and final approval from the appointments committee of the cabinet. eligibility norms are anyway quite narrow and internal options are limited. In fact, the current interim head Ravi himself, like I told you earlier, does not qualify for the full-time role. So the three-month extension has become a sort of a convenient workaround. For Ravi, staying on as a civil servant protects him from the pay volatility of a full-time PSU executive post, especially at a company with PSNL's historically weak finances. For the government, it keeps a technically capable 1990s batch Indian telecom service officer in charge

without making a permanent commitment. But that convenience has a cost. We are talking here about decisions like where to launch 5G first, how to deploy newly allocated spectrum, which markets to prioritize, how to fix pricing and distribution, these type of decisions need a leader who knows that they will be around long enough to see them through. The employees at BSNL feel it too.

In April, the BSNL Employees Union wrote to Ravi, flagging that a committee formed a year ago to draft the non-executive promotion policy had never once convened. Another committee set up to revise burks and allowances had also gone quiet. We are not settled, said Anamishandramitra the union's head to my colleague, the Ken reporter Priel Mata. For a company attempting a turnaround, unsettled employees are a structural problem.

BSNL has around 65,000 workers. If they are dragging rather than driving, the sales engine, which is the very thing that BSNL needs to build, stays stalled. The government is now weighing candidates from the private sector. But analysts are skeptical about how much room a private sector hire would actually have. Because BSNL is overstaffed and its PSU culture runs deep. Air India is actually a great reference point here. The Tatar's took over in 2022 and committed $400 million overhaul, ordered 470 new aircrafts, invested heavily in cabin upgrades and pilot hiring,

but the airline still lost nearly 11,000 crore rupees in FY 2025. On-time performance and customer satisfaction scores also lagged behind Indigo throughout 2024. So you see, the structural weight of a legacy state carry-all is hard to shift, even with institutional backing. BSNL has fewer resources and even fewer options. But even if BSNL gets a full-time. CMD tomorrow, the deeper problem will remain. More on this in the next segment. In March 2026, Airtel and Gio together added over 8 million subscribers. BSNL added 17,000. The gap is so wide that conventional competition, whether it's on price or on brand or on

distribution, looks like a losing proposition anyway. BSNL's only real pricing move so far. has been a 70-day 4G data plan at 599 a month. Now, comparable plans from geo, airtel and waterphone cost at least 40% more, but they come bundled with 5G, GOTV, wink music and unlimited nighttime data. The price advantage has not really translated into loyalty. Plus, they don't really have a loyalty program or a bundle ecosystem or a campaign at the scale that its private competitors consistently deploy. Which is why the 5G rollout, which is expected around August this year,

is unlikely to change the calculus dramatically. Airtel and Gio have already deployed at scale. The consumer 5G market, as one analyst told my colleague Priel, is close to saturated for late entrance. So what then is the real play here? Some industry insiders point to a different model entirely. State-owned telecom companies in many countries, open reach in the UK, NBNCo and Telstra Infraco in Australia have moved away from retail competition.

They instead own and operate network infrastructure and lease access to other operators, wholesale rather than retail. Now, to be fair, BSNM has already made some moves in this direction. In 2024, it entered the enterprise market for private 5G networks ahead of Airtel and Geo as well. It deployed a private 5G network for Coal India, partnered with L&T for enterprise expansion, and is also eyeing growth in fixed wireless and IOT segments, which are still growing in India. The argument from some quarters is that BSNL's market share is a measure of its retail footprint and a poor measure of its broader relevance.

Government connectivity, sensitive regions, indigenous technology promotion, these are roles that the private players will never be able to fill. But choosing that path, committing to it, designing around it, requires a leader with a clear mandate and enough runway to act on. Right now, BSNL has a strategy in theory and a leader in installments. That combination really produces the kind of decisive shift that the company really needs. As competitors continue marching ahead and the window for a real turnaround grows narrower and narrower. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform.

What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the can.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Niktha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv Sien.