BSNL hopes to cut non-payment of bills by 50% in Gujarat

After burning its fingers with unpaid bills worth Rs 100 crore in Gujarat, state-owned telecom service provider BSNL hopes to bring down the number by 50 per cent by the end of the financial year 2009-10. For this, the company has tied up with Pune-based DigiTech Telematics Pvt. Ltd. (DTPL) to collect its bills in Gujarat, apart from Maharashtra, Goa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

After Maharashtra, both BSNL and DTPL launched their online, BSNL Bill Payment (BPP) service for the former's mobile, landline, broadband and WLL post paid customers in Gujarat recently. "So far we were unable to collect unpaid bills in the state fully. To overcome this, we tied up with DTPL whom we have outsourced our bill collection activities. With their unique online services, we hope to bring the amount of unpaid bills by 50 per cent by the end of financial year 2009-10," said Satya Pal, chief general manager, Gujarat circle of BSNL.

Talking about the product, Sudhanshu Godbole, managing director of DTPL said, "BSNL subscribers, especially in the semi-urban and rural areas, can now avail information about their bills as well as make payments through our franchised outlets. So far, several genuine subscribers had complained about non-receipt of bills through post. Therefore, we plan to set up a wide network of 5,000 outlets of which 60 per cent will be in rural areas so that subscribers need not wait for their bills and instead avail online information from these outlets."

On its part, DTPL will make payments in advance upto a certain credit limit to BSNL before receiving bill payments on behalf of the telecom service provider. DTPL sub-franchisees will collect BSNL Bill Payments by the way of cash, cheque or DD using secure and electronic system through ePoS, Web, GPRS and SMS.

Meanwhile, Satya Pal added that BSNL incurred a loss of over Rs 260 crore in the last financial year because the company "couldn't grow in GSM". Currently, BSNL has a subscriber base of two million for landline and 2.5 million for mobile in Gujarat.