 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. The Indian public sector telecom service provider BSNL is currently facing a massive crisis that threatens its survival. BSNL was founded 19 years ago in 2000 and has been providing telecom services across India, including to those living in the most remote corners of the country. But the current crisis has caused a deterioration in the quality of BSNL's services. So what is the crisis? The crisis BSNL is facing today is multi-fold and largely stems from the neoliberal policies of the current far-right BJP government as well as the preceding governments which have favored private operators while denying and even playing field to BSNL. The once profit-making enterprise is now unable to pay its employees their salaries. Contractual workers in BSNL have not been paid salaries since January this year. Some have been waiting for their wages for nearly one year. The higher management of the company is blaming the financial crisis on the number of employees and workers that have been hired. In the name of cutting down avoidable expenditure, 30% of contractual workers are being laid off. Some have already been fired without their dues being paid. BSNL's services are also dropping in quality because of this financial crunch. The government is not allocating enough funds for it to pay off its electricity bills. As a result, 550 towers out of the 1 lakh towers owned by the company throughout India were shut down. This is forcing BSNL customers to look for other telecom operators. The publicly owned company is also unable to provide users with the latest services because the government is not allocating BSNL any part of the 4G spectrum. Moreover, there has also been no significant recruitment in the company in the last 25 years, making it harder for it to keep up the quality of services. Why the crisis? Up to 2014, BSNL was earning profit. From 2016, BSNL went on loss. Not only BSNL, Yatkel went on loss. Vodafone went on loss. Why? It is because the entry of Reliance, one company, one private company, Reliance Geo has entered and they have actually swallowed the subscribers with the patronise of Modi government. While the crisis in BSNL began before Reliance Geo's entry, it became much worse because of it. In fact, India's entire telecom sector is still reeling from the impact of Reliance Geo's entry. The owner of Reliance Industries Limited, Mukesh Ambani, is India's wealthiest man and is known to have close ties with the ruling government. But Geo was able to disrupt the market in this manner only because of the Indian government's support. Throughout the process of Geo's launch, from acquisitions of licenses and spectrum to the rollout of services, Reliance violated various regulations. Some rules and regulations were even modified on Geo's request. The company faced no punitive measures for these violations, enjoying the complete support of the government in dominating the market. Due to its wealthy parent company and the huge amount of bank loans granted to Geo, the telecom provider offered free services for over eight months after the launch. This itself violated the rule of free services being permissible for only a 90-day testing period after launch. Even after the free period ended, Geo's services were made available at a price much lower than all its competitors. This predatory pricing forced other telecom services to also slash their prices and incur huge losses. Many companies were even forced to merge or shut shop. As a result, apart from Reliance Geo and BSNL, only two other telecom companies remain in India, Bharti Airtel and the merged Vodafone Idea. Despite all these obstacles, it is only public sector BSNL which has continued to challenge the Reliance Geo juggernaut. From 2017 to 2018, the number of BSNL's mobile customers grew by 11.7%. This is much more than the 9.5% growth in Airtel and 3.8% growth in Vodafone, 3.2% growth in Idea. But this government continues to be hell-bent on not letting the public sector company perform and survive. India's Department of Telecommunications only allows BSNL to take loans for capital expenditure, not operational expenditure restricting its operations. This, even though BSNL's debt of Rs 13,900 crore or 2 billion dollars is much less than that of private operators. Vodafone has a debt of Rs 1.2 lakh crore, Airtel has a debt of Rs 1.13 lakh crore and Geo has a debt of about Rs 2 lakh crore or 30 billion dollars. The Indian government is not even permitting BSNL to monetize the land assets it owns for raising revenue. It is speculated that the current low data prices cannot go on indefinitely. Once more of the competition is wiped out, which seems likely, the data prices in India are expected to shoot up. If the government's proposal of shutting down BSNL instead of reviving it goes through, the only service provider keeping a check on prices will also no longer be present. But the employees of BSNL are not ready to accept all this sitting down. Various employee unions and executive unions of BSNL have joined hands to carry forward a struggle demanding their rights as employees as well as the protection of BSNL from Clota. They have carried out nationwide strikes, hunger strikes and various other protest actions. A public sector company which is giving service to the remotest areas of the country with all difficulties we want to say to the common people it is your company government may come government may go but this BSNL is serving to the nation that serving to the nation should not be deprived. Had our huge investments in the rural areas huge investments for the last 17 years we had no returns virtually on those investments. We were meeting the social obligations of telecom policy not earning profits.