iWorld
MTNL dials into debt: telecom giant defaults on Rs 8,346 crore in bank loans
MUMBAI: A telecom Goliath has tripped on its own cables. Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) has rung the wrong number with its bankers. The state-owned telco has officially defaulted on a jaw-dropping Rs 8,346 crore worth of loans—putting the “broke” in “dial tone broke”.
While the rest of the world streams 4K videos and binge-watches on blazing fast connections, MTNL seems to be buffering… financially.
On 19 April, MTNL told the bourses that it has failed to cough up both the principal and interest on loans taken from not one, not two, but seven state-run banks. Talk about spreading the love—and the liability.
The missed payments include overdue interest worth Rs 551.90 crore and unpaid principal of Rs 1,635.39 crore. In total, it owes Rs 8,346.24 crore to the likes of Union Bank of India, Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, UCO Bank, Punjab & Sind Bank, and Indian Overseas Bank. Every bank gets a slice of the default pie.
The financial plot thickened with MTNL’s relationship with Union Bank of India turning sour on 12 August 2024, where a hefty Rs 3,334.57 crore in principal remained unpaid, and Rs 298.85 crore in interest hung in the air.
Things didn’t improve—by 4 September 2024, Bank of India found itself on the default roster too, owed Rs 999.54 crore in principal and Rs 77.80 crore in interest.
A few days later, on 9 September, Punjab National Bank’s dues followed suit, with Rs 432.16 crore in principal and Rs 32.10 crore interest unpaid.
Come 28 September, State Bank of India and UCO Bank were both ghosted by MTNL, left with mounting dues and no callbacks. Then, on 8 October, Punjab & Sind Bank got stood up.
Eventually, Indian Overseas Bank met the same fate on 3 February 2025, sealing MTNL’s full-blown debt drama.
The situation isn’t just a few late EMIs. MTNL’s total financial baggage weighs in at a staggering Rs 33,568 crore, including Rs 8,346 crore in bank loans, Rs 24,071 crore in sovereign-guaranteed bonds, and a Rs 1,151 crore loan from the Department of Telecommunications just to pay interest on those bonds.
That’s like borrowing money to pay the interest on money you borrowed to pay interest.
Shakespeare would call this tragedy.
Accountants call it Thursday.
Despite this financial sinkhole, the company has maintained a straight face in its compliance filing with the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE), stating only that it’s defaulted, and here’s the Excel sheet to prove it. Bureaucratic honesty, if nothing else.
The question now is: what next? Will the Department of Telecommunications come riding in with a fresh bailout cheque and a stern frown? Or is MTNL setting the stage for another round of disinvestment drama?
For now, shareholders are left listening to static, and taxpayers are once again left wondering whether the “public” in public sector means “publicly funded bailouts” on loop.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
