J.R. Gupta is a telecom veteran. After reading electrical engineering at Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, where he was a gold medalist, Gupta joined the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in 1972 as assistant divisional engineer, telegraphs, after passing the all-India competitive examination conducted by the UPSC. He stayed at DoT for 33 years.
In his career, he has worked in numerous areas ?? installation and commissioning of telecom transmission projects, planning, network operations and maintenance, human resource development, regulatory affairs, and licensing and standardisation.
Before joining the BSNL board last year as director, operations, he had been working as senior deputy director-general, heading the Telecom Engineering Centre. This is a pioneering and reputed institution that works on telecom standardisation, brings out specifications for telecom equipment, services and networks, and issues type approval and interface approval.
In his current role, his main thrust is on improving the systems and methods for the optimal performance of BSNL’s existing infrastructure and network. He is focusing, for example, on reducing faults in landline telephone services. One way of doing this is to make the network “poleless”. The idea is to replace the telephone poles with wall-mounted and indoor distribution boxes.
“Apart from other measures such as upgrading telephone maintenance, introducing measures for back-up power supply arrangements for remote and rural area exchanges (where power supply is a serious issue) we also have a prestigious project on hand for introducing computer-based CDR-conversant billing and customer care systems. Once this has been implemented, it will revolutionise our billing and customer care services,” says Gupta.
He is excited by the massive challenges that lie ahead for BSNL, such as reaching out to each and every village in the country and keeping its leadership position in providing state-of-the-art telecom services to ordinary consumers at affordable prices. “By virtue of our inherent strength, we are geared up to meet all these challenges. We plan to connect all unconnected villages by the end of 2007,” says Gupta.
BSNL is the largest data services provider in the country and is aggressively expanding its broadband and internet services. It is the largest mobile service provider in its areas of operation (leaving aside Delhi and Mumbai) even though the company started late in 2002, as compared with private operators who started in 1995.
BSNL has been instrumental in bringing down tariffs to affordable levels without any hidden cost. Its latest OneIndia tariff plan allows customers to make a call from any place to any place in the country at Re 1 a minute.
“We are quite hopeful that the OneIndia tariff plan will be very enthusiastically received. This will empower people to talk from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Porbandar to Port Blair by paying just Re 1 for a minute. It will unleash the real power of Re 1. We are gearing up to migrate the existing customers to the new plan as well as any new customer who opts for it. We expect that landline customers who had thought of surrendering their connection in favour of mobile connections will no longer do so. It means that around 3 million customers per annum may be retained in the landline segment alone apart from adding new customers in the landline category as well,” says Gupta.
The BSNL OneIndia tariff plan is unique in the sense that landline customers can call within the telecom circle for Re 1 per minute, and so can mobile post-paid and prepaid customers calling within the BSNL network.
In the area of GSM mobile services, over and above a customer base of 12 million, BSNL has been adding about 1 million customers per month now. Gupta says the company is planning to procure 60 million additional lines which will also be 3G compliant. So, BSNL will be in a position to launch 3G mobile services the moment the spectrum for this is allotted by the government.
It’s difficult for a man who has had such a long career to single out particularly satisfying assignments but, when pushed to it, Gupta chooses two. One of these is the time that he was working as area manager (long distance) in the erstwhile Delhi Telephones (now MTNL Delhi) from 1982 to 1989.
“I had the responsibility of managing trunk services ?? that’s operator-assisted trunk calls, both inland and international ?? and auto-manual services such as directory enquiries, local assistance, and morning alarm. This was a time when STD services were available only in major cities and towns and ISD was not available initially. It was slowly introduced for the UK, the US and then other countries. The telephone exchanges were the analog type, including treasure cross-bar and some electronic exchanges,” he recalls.
There were about 2,200 women telephone operators handling the auto-manual trunk services, including putting through morning alarms, assisting in connecting local calls (199 service) when there was a problem, and putting through about 2,000 international and 15,000 inland trunk calls on a daily basis.
“Managing the logistics themselves, apart from maintenance and operation of the exchanges, required considerable effort. Several automation schemes, computerisation of auto-manual services and new incentive schemes for operators were introduced at that time. For three years, my operators were awarded the Sanchar Doot Award (the highest national award in the telecom service sector) for their performance,” says Gupta with pride.
The second assignment he recalls with special fondness was as deputy director general (value-added services) in the Telecom Commission headquarters, dealing with licensing and regulation of cellular mobile and value-added services during 1996-2002. This period saw a paradigm shift in the licensing policy. A new telecom policy in 1999 replaced the old fixed licensing fee regime with a new licensing fee regime and new players came into cellular services. The old basic services and cellular licensing was replaced by UASL with any number of operators.
“Starting from scratch in 1996 to reach a level of 1.2 million customers in 1999, the number of cellular customers grew exponentially from 1999 onwards. With the change in the licensing regime, the telecom service sector, which had been marred by litigation, emerged to be the most competitive and growing sector,” he says.
The old outstanding licence fee dues of about Rs 40 billion were realised from the operators along with interest. An additional licence fee of more than Rs 17 billion was received from the operators who were granted additional mobile services. “This was the most difficult and challenging period of telecom service sector privatisation. It was a new, successful experiment of migrating the telecom service industry from a fixed licence fee regime to a revenue-sharing regime that was not attempted in any other country.”
Gupta is aware of BSNL’s huge resources and advantages. It has a nationwide telecom infrastructure of 36,000 telephone exchanges, more than 400,000 km of optic fibre cable, huge technical and human resources, and a very high degree of in-house knowledge about all types of telecom technologies.
BSNL is required to work within the constraints of a public sector firm it is answerable for its decisions to the comptroller and auditor general and government rules on procuring goods and services have to be complied with. “These constraints can be restrictive in some ways but they’re also good because they ensure that BSNL takes the right decisions in a transparent and non-discriminatory manner, even if it means delays in the decisionmaking process,” explains Gupta.
On emerging trends, Gupta thinks future demand will be for video on demand, mobile TV, value-added services, and more data-centric services. On the technology front, IT technology will be extensively deployed. 3G mobile services will also be rolled out in the near future.
“We are going to have a large-scale rollout of mobile services in semi-urban and rural areas. In rural areas, there will be infrastructure savings by operators supporting the USO Fund so as to reduce capital as well as operating costs. BSNL is also providing large-scale interconnectivity to all other operators at various Level1 and Level-2 TAX exchanges as well as other tandem exchanges. More than 30,000 E-1s at more than 1,100 PoIs and interconnect exchanges are going to be set up by sharing the costs among the operators,” he says.
On his management style, Gupta says he delegates all the authority vested in him as far as possible. He has also decentralised many processes. “I have a lot of faith in the human resources available in BSNL. I can work in difficult circumstances without much strain. I believe this is my strength.As far as weaknesses are concerned, I would not like to reveal any! I have never shied away from working hands-on in any type of job. I have not changed much over the years. I am from a rural background and continue to be the same as I used to, with a down-to-earth attitude.”
Gupta gets hardly any spare time. At weekends, he enjoys watching movies with his wife or a TV serial. “I used to enjoy watching Buniyad, which is through its second rerun, as is the Mahabharata. Otherwise, typically, I spend three hours in the morning getting ready for the office, starting with some pranayam, yoga and puja. In office, it gets hectic, with lots of files and papers to look at, lots of meetings and discussions and visitors. I get home at around 8 p.m. when I have dinner followed by some TV and a walk,” says Gupta.
Gupta’s 86-year-old father lives with him and his wife. “She has been very supportive and understanding about the requirements of my job,” he says. They have two sons, both electronics engineers.
