The CMD's post has been vacant since last July, when the earlier CMD of VSNL, BK Syngal retired. Since then , Amitabh Kumar, director operations of VSNL has been holding the charge of the acting CMD.

The selection of a CMD for VSNL has been involved in a lot of controversy. First, the Public Enterprises Selection Board (PESB) conducted and interview for candidates for the post in November last year. At that stage, Narendra Sharma, presently secretary in the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), was the first on the PESB shortlist followed by S K Gupta.

However, this panel was rejected after the government decided to have a wider selection from candidates even in the private sector.

In the present round, interviewswere held for 17 candidates on June 3. This time, S K Gupta was placed first on the selected panel followed by Narendra Sharma and B R Khurana of Bharati Enterprises in the third place.

There had been resentment within the VSNL as Amitabh Kumar was junior to the other directors on the VSNL Board. In fact none of these directors were reporting to Kumar and instead reported to members of the Telecom Commission. Allegations flew thick and fast between VSNL and the DoT with telecom secretary Anil Kumar being charged with attempts to favour Amitabh's candidature (he even wrote letters to the cabinet secretary to invite Kumar for the interview even though he was not eligible for the post) because the two were related.