Government has aggressive plans to monetise land assets of BSNL: Scindia

The government will pursue monetisation of the land assets of State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) aggressively at an outlay of around ₹4,000 crore, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Minister of Telecommunications has said. This is being looked at different stages – the first is (for land assets) till ₹100 crore which can be dealt with directly by the BSNL Board and the Group of Ministers (GoM). The third level is (that of) our large ticket land masses, which will be handled by the Ministry of Finance (MoF) through the National Land Monetisation Corporation (NLMC), and we already have a pipeline of roughly ₹4,000 crore in place,” Scindia told businessline in a recent interview.

Out of the ₹4,000 crore set aside, around ₹1,200 crore-worth of land assets will be below the ₹100-crore limit so that the Board of BSNL and the GoM can go ahead with the investment, he said, adding that the balance big passes will have to be run by the NLMC. “So, we have a very aggressive timeline on that... the MoF has put a target for this fiscal (2024-25) – of about ₹800 crore – and we’ve already made ₹840 crore worth of investment,” added Scindia.

According to a recent reply to the Parliament, the Ministry of Communications said that telecom firms BSNL and MTNL have earned a total of ₹12,984.86 crore from monetisation of land, buildings, towers and fibre since 2019. BSNL has earned ₹2,387.82 crore and MTNL ₹2,134.61 crore up to January 2025 from just monetisation of lands and buildings, it informed. Additionally, BSNL has earned ₹8,204.18 crore and MTNL ₹258.25 crore from monetisation of close assets comprising tower and fibre up to January 2025, the Parliament was informed.

According to Scindia, BSNL has seen a massive turnaround in the last 10 years – increase in topline of the business, cutting off costs, as well as improvement in operating profit. The government is also infusing a huge amount of capex, he said.

We have an aggressive plan of setting up 4G towers on about one lakh sites, out of which about 89,000 sites have already seen installations. Our 4G network is already up and running for close to about 1.8 crore customers and we are looking forward to growing that,” said the Minister.