Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) has suffered a loss of about Tk 1,500 crore for erasing call records from its international truck exchange (ITX), says a study of the Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB).
It reveals that there was no international calls record at the BTCL ITX located at city’s Mohakhali during January 2011 to November 2012 while the officials of the ITX in collusion with others deleted the call records showing technical faults at the exchange. The BTCL ITX receives the international incoming calls through the international gateway and the ITX diverts the calls to the ICX (interconnection exchange) to reach it to the mobile operators.
TIB programme manger (research and policy) Dipu Roy presented the findings of the study, ‘BTCL: Challenges of Good Governance and Way Forward’ at BRAC Centre Inn on Wednesday.
TIB trustee board member M Hafizuddin Khan, TIB executive director Dr Iftekharuzzman, deputy executive director Dr Sumaiya Khair and director (research and policy) Rafiqul Hassan were present at the press conference.
According to the study, the BTCL showed calls of 5.79 billion minutes in its call records against the total calls of 8.5 billion minutes in 2011 despite the increasing trend of making international calls.
It identified that former officials of BTCL’s maintenance and operation division and officials of the ministry concerned were involved in call tampering causing a huge amount of losses to the state-owned telecommunications company.
The TIB study also found that there are dues of Tk 965 crore to the international carriers while Tk 500 could not be realised as the carriers are out of business now.
About the voice over internet protocol (VoIP), it says that many firms are doing VoIP business bypassing the calls from the monitoring of the BTCL.
And, as the BTCL has given licenses of the International Internet Gateway (IIG) to 37 companies, many are involved in VoIP business by using their gateways, casting a negative impact on BTCL’s revenue.
The TIB recommended taking immediate steps so that the BTCL could be operated fully as a private limited company within the next six months.
Speaking at the press conference, TIB executive director Dr Iftekharuzzman said although the government announced the BTCL as a private limited company on June 30 in 2008, it could not yet be done.
“The government should select its policy in this regard…BTCL is facing an identity crisis as it is neither a public institution nor a limited company,” he added.
M Hafizuddin Khan said since the government had not taken any policy to convert the public institution to a private company, the BTCL is facing problems now. – UNB
