This is what happened to state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) in early 2000, when mobile telephony began to boom in the country. They failed to capitalise on this generational shift and now run the risk of becoming irrelevant to consumers. Predictably, both are struggling with mounting losses.

For the private sector players, the minister’s message is that he’s willing to take a re-look at the merger and acquisition guidelines finalised by the UPA government, if they feel that it is not workable. Also that sufficient spectrum to operators and its optimum utilisation by them will be ensured by him.

State-run BSNL had sought additional compensation equivalent to 16.5 per cent of the project cost to encourage its staff to work in hostile regions prone to left wing extremism.

In a presentation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seen by ET, DoT said it expects to "secure Cabinet approval for the proposed BSNL-MTNL merger by June 30 next year".

According to the figures released by sectoral regulator Trai, BSNL lost 21.40 lakh subscribers in June and its user base has shrunk to 8.94 crore at the end of month.

The other two reasons for BSNL slipping into the red, according to him, were high employee cost and poor perception of quality of service provided.

BSNL has sought DoT's intervention to prevail upon Idea to sign a fresh interconnect pact with it in Assam, J&K, Northeast, Kolkata, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu (including Chennai) and Odisha circles where the Aditya Birla group firm was issued fresh unified licences after its earlier operating permits in these markets were quashed in the 2G case.

In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, minister of communications and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad said loss for landline business of BSNL for 2013-14 stood at Rs 14,979 crore and net loss at Rs 7085 crore. The figures for the period are provisional and unaudited.