BSNL will invest Rs 10 billion in various initiatives in West Bengal between October 2005 and March 31, 2006. Of the proposed corpus, Rs 6.5 billion will be invested in the West Bengal telecom circle while the balance Rs 3.5 billion will be invested in the Kolkata telecom district. An amount of Rs 6 billion would go towards expansion of the CellOne mobile service while Rs 2 billion will be invested in augmenting the IT infrastructure.
Broadband rollout and expansion of the intelligent network will each entail a further investment of Rs 1 billion. The West Bengal telecom circle of BSNL currently has 374,000 cellular customers. It is expected that the number of BSNL cellular customers in the West Bengal telecom circle will touch 1.2 million by the end of March 2006. Broadband services will be introduced in towns such as Siliguri, Durgapur, Asansol, Haldia andGangtok. Revenue generation in the West Bengal telecom circle in the current fiscal year is expected to exceed Rs 10 billion.
