RailTel Corporation of India's initial public offering (IPO) opened for subscription on Tuesday to raise over Rs 800 crore. The state-owned company’s issue will close on February 18 and the price band for the IPO has been set at Rs 93-94 per share. This is an all-out OFS; so the company is not getting any money from the issue, the government will be divesting a chunk of its holdings.

Speaking in an interview with CNBC-TV18, Puneet Chawla, CMD of the company said, “We are on a rapid growth path but we are not only dependent on investments made by Indian Railways; 25-30 percent of our income comes from the Railways, 25-30 percent from other government sector and 40 percent from the private sector.”

On modernisation plans, “However, Indian Railways is going for a big leap in modernization, digitalization and RailTel is a partner in Indian Railways’ quest for digitalization.”

On the business front, Chawla said, “Revenue growth now will be on a fast upward trajectory. We have been upgrading our networks, growing our data centres with internal accruals over the last few years and further also we have plans, since the demand for services, especially post COVID has increased exponentially both in the telecom services as well as data centre services. So we certainly have a plan, investments in the range of Rs 100-150 crore per year over the next few years and all this we will be able to manage through our internal accruals.”

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(Edited by : Ajay Vaishnav)