Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd plans to invest Rs 2,284 crore (Rs 22.84 billion) this fiscal for developing the telecom infrastructure, including the code division multiple access networks in the country, Rajya Sabha was informed on Thursday.
Announcing this, Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology Ashok Pradhan said in a written reply that the main projects planned by MTNL include provision of 350,000 new connections by augmenting the net switching capacity by 400,000.
Also, it plans to provide new 50,000 trunk automatic exchange tandem lines, commission 200 digital line connections and replace 395,000 E-10B switches.
Pradhan said MTNL has formulated a voluntary retirement scheme for its group C and D employees, but the scheme is yet to be approved by the government.
The minister said cellular subscribers grew to over 1.51 crore (15.1 million) by July 2003 as against 338,665 in April 1997.
On whether the government had recommended an alternative route of placing FII investment outside the existing sectoral cap, subject to the overall cap of 74 per cent, Pradhan said a proposal to allow FII investment outside the sectoral cap was "at the discussion level only."
In reply to another question, he said the number of personal computers sold during 2002-03 were 22.9 lakh (2.3 million) as against 18.8 lakh (1.9 million) in 2000-01.