Bharti Airtel head visits Dhaka***

President of Bharti Airtel, one of the mobile service providers in India, Atul Bindal visited Dhaka recently on a short tour. During his visit, he met with Editor of the Financial Express (FE) Moazzem Hossain and discussed various issues on telecom sector. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Airtel Bangladesh Limited Chris Tobit and other top officials were also present during the meeting. During the meeting with FE editor, Mr Bindal emphasised various aspects of the telecommunication industry, the present economic situation of Bangladesh and Airtel's way forward in Bangladesh, a press release issued Saturday by ForethoughtPR said. Referring to the quick network rollout of Airtel in Bangladesh, Mr Bindal said at least one tower is being readied almost every day. He added, "This is the pace we would like to harness on in the coming months." Apart from that, he emphasised Airtel's hard work to provide top notch customer experience by introducing various innovative products and services like m-Commerce and mobile banking. Stressing the need for cooperation among the telecommunication operators, he said, "Although it may not happen dramatically, but further cooperation is needed at the industry level for the sake of maintaining healthy growth in the industry." Pointing to the cooperation with other telecom operators, the CEO of Airtel Bangladesh added although the pace is slow, the operators have started responding to the call for cooperation. "We have signed agreements with all operators for passive infrastructure sharing. We are looking at the possibility of active sharing in future," he said. While discussing the possible corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative with the FE editor, Mr Bindal stated that there was a plan to undertake CSR initiatives in Bangladesh like the projects Bharti Foundation was doing in India. "As far as social responsibility is concerned, we want to do something beyond our business. We want to go deeper into the country with our social initiatives," he added. Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with operations in 19 countries across Asia and Africa. The company offers mobile voice and data services, fixed line, high speed broadband, IPTV, DTH, turnkey telecom solutions for enterprises and national and international long distance services to carriers. Bharti Airtel has been ranked among the six best performing technology companies in the world by BusinessWeek. Bharti Airtel had over 218 million customers across its operations at the end of March 2011. Airtel Bangladesh Limited is a concern of Bharti Airtel Limited. It formally started its journey in Bangladesh on December 20, 2010, making a fresh investment of $300 million to rapidly expand its operation in the country. As a result of this investment, the overall investment of the company stands at $1.0 billion in the region.