Sell off BSNL to fund education, says Pitroda

The National Knowledge Commission chairperson Sam Pitroda says the public sector telecom major BSNL could be sold and the proceeds invested in education, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Jan 14, 2007, 01:12:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A day after the Report to the Nation 2006 was presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the National Knowledge Commission chairperson Sam Pitroda said that the public sector telecom major BSNL could be sold and the proceeds invested in education. The Prime Minister had, on Friday, identified education as a sector which needed reform to provide knowledge access to all.

Pitroda said the BSNL could fetch Rs 80,000 crores which should be enough to take care of the immediate needs of the education sector. “I don’t understand what business the government has in the telecom sector. It could sell BSNL and invest the money in the future of the country through education,” Pitroda said.

Pitroda who laid the foundations of India’s telecom revolution 20 years ago, said BSNL is bound to lose its value with the private sector’s market share increasing. “By selling it now the government will fetch good money,” he told HT on Saturday. But, he admitted that such a ‘bold decision’ would require ‘a lot of guts’.

Such a decision could also help increase the GDP for education to six per cent as promised in the National Common Minimum Programme.

“There is no system of education in the world that is not based on significant public outlays,” he said in the report.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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