MTNL's Year Of Reckoning
Fine, MTNL's Narendra Sharma articulated his desire to make the company a great Telco. But can he overcome the regulatory, organisational, and competive issues involved.
By Suveen K. Sinha
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In his twelfth floor office in, arguably, the swankest high-rise in New Delhi's central business district, Connaught Place, Narendra Sharma, the Chairman and Managing Director of the predominantly government-owned Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd. (MTNL) is rifling through a file of the day's news clippings. The new chairman (he's been in the corner room of MTNL for exactly 90 days now) is probably looking for a clue to the dismal run of the MTNL scrip on the Bombay Stock Exchange. He's also done the usual round of meetings with i-bankers and analysts. Now, Sharma is in the process of launching a broadside of initiatives that could change the way the monolith he runs is perceived. Only the man's style is definitely understated, not the rabble-rousing approach of his predecessor in the hot seat, S. Rajagopalan.
Thus, when MTNL finally formed the 100 per cent subsidiary it had been talking of for some time, Millennium Telecom, on November 22 this year, it did so quietly. In one way, MTNL's hand was forced by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) which ruled in 1998 that the company would have to maintain separate accounts for its telecom businesses, and its value-added businesses like internet services, call centers, and the like, a ruling that effectively r ...