See also the MTNL home page and MTNL's online Mumbai directory.
The Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) was founded in 1986 to serve the telecom needs of Delhi and Mumbai. It was meant to clear a huge backlog of requests for phone connections in these cities, and make communications more accessible in other ways such as by setting up large numbers of public call offices. In addition, it was supposed to introduce new technologies and services.
In Mumbai MTNL has leased out 1,855,629 lines to users, of which more than 93% are digital lines. These statistics from April 1998 show that roughly one in 14 people in Mumbai own a phone. There are 124 telephone exchanges in Mumbai serving 957 sq Km of the city, with an installed capacity of over 2 million lines. There are also 41,491 public call offices in Mumbai.
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Fault reporting Complaints: 198/ xxx-2198 Engineer (Divn): xxx-2000 Here xxx is the 3 digit code for your exchange |
Although customer billing services are fully computerised, the quality of service offerred to consumers is rather poor. Fault repair and directory services are being computerised, but in the meanwhile strong dissatisfaction is often expressed by irate consumers.
MTNL offers voice, fax and data services of various kinds. It has recently introduced ISDN services including high qualtiy voice or data transmission at 64 Kb/s and video conferecing at 128 Kb/s or 384 Kb/s. It plans to offer subscriber card calling facilities in the future.
MTNL shares are traded in most of the stock exchanges in the country. MTNL has probably posted the largest profits among all public sector undertakings in the last few financial years.
| year | turnover (crore Rs.) | profit before tax (crore Rs.) | % profit |
| 1990-91 | 1310.10 | 193.07 | 14.74 |
| 1991-92 | 1555.31 | 376.23 | 24.19 |
| 1992-93 | 1831.91 | 481.37 | 26.28 |
| 1993-94 | 2507.65 | 780.41 | 31.12 |
| 1994-95 | 1654.00 | 594.00 | 35.30 |
| 1995-96 | 3518.60 | 1248.10 | 35.47 |
| 1996-97 | 4096.20 | 1482.10 | 36.18 |