Next time you get an MTNL bill, you can simply ignore it. You can ignore the next month's bill as well. After all, MTNL has been playing Santa Claus for many years now.
MTNL is definitely the most trusted company for more than 5 lakh customers. Most of these customers have not paid their telephone bills – for both landline and mobile phones – for many months now, amounting to nearly Rs 700 crore. Strangely, the telephone company is not keen on collecting the payments from these defaulters.
In an independent investigation, CNN-IBN has unearthed deep-rooted corruption inside this public sector undertaking and discovered how it suits a few officials if telephone bills are never collected.
In late 2004, the MTNL top brass had decided to outsource the recovery of dues in view of a sharp rise in the number of defaulters and outstanding bills after it was observed that the internal recovery mechanism had failed to handle the task in hand.
A tender was floated and the job was awarded to three companies. But strangely, the three companies were not allowed to do their job. Instead, they were instructed not to touch thousands of 'commercially important' defaulters.
For instance, BLS Detectives – one of the three firms – was given the task of recovering nearly Rs 450 crore. But the telecom major didn't advertise the newly recruited collection agents. In fact, when the BLS Detectives started work, they faced total non-cooperation and hostility from the MTNL staff who even prevented them from collecting their dues.
Subsequently, MTNL refused to honour the signed contract. The finance department of MTNL was the most hostile and in a few months they effectively closed the door on the outsourcing agents.
“It seems like they were hell-bent on not allowing us to perform our mandate," Vinod Agarwal, Chairman of BLS Detectives, alleged.
Despite all the hostility, BLS Detectives managed to recover Rs 10 crore from defaulters. Documents available exclusively with CNN-IBN clearly show how cheques collected by the outsourcing agencies were given to MTNL, but in spite of repeated reminders; they were never deposited in the bank till they became invalid. The telecom company also refused to take criminal action against the defaulters whose cheques bounced.
The company has also put a ban on chasing commercially-important customers, who include hundreds of foreign embassies in New Delhi, including embassies of America, China, Spain, Pakistan, Italy, South Africa, Denmark, Saudi Arabia and Germany.
There are also several departments and ministries of the Government of India, including the Cabinet Secretariat, Income-Tax department, Tourism Ministry, Ministry of external Affairs, Ministry of Human Resource and development, Ministry of Home Affairs, Finance Ministry, Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Agriculture.
Other privileged customers include Punjab National Bank, State Bank of Patiala and Standard Chartered, private enterprises including drug major Ranbaxy, FabIndia, Alsthom Power and software giants Oracle. In all, there are nearly 80,000 defaulters and their dues work out to a whopping Rs 200 crore.
Speaking to CNN-IBN on the condition of anonymity, many MTNL officiers claimed that the recovery department is bribed by those consumers who do not pay their bills, which means outsourcing the recovery system has stopped their illegal income.
Transparency is not really a strength at MTNL. Despite repeated efforts, MTNL's Executive Director refused to defend his company on camera though he admitted that he was aware of such complaints.
"The way their financial branches of the different zones have decided to question decisions of the executive directors and board and if the arrears have run up to Rs 513 crore, it's obvious that something is seriously wrong," says Shantanu Sen, former joint director of CBI.
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