NEW DELHI: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited ( BSNL ) will link salaries to the performance of its two lakh employees from 2017 based on the recommendations from the third pay revision committee (PRC), even as the state-run telecom company remains on track to achieve a 15% market share, its chairman said.“2017 is the year when PRC recommendations will be placed and the salary of public-sector companies’ employees will be increased and that will also call for the performance-linked pay,” Anupam Shrivastava told ET.The government, on June 9 this year, formed the committee to look into the revision of salaries at central public sector enterprises, and this revision is likely to be delivered to employees in 2017.The BSNL top executive said since PSU employees were set to get revised salaries in the third PRC recommendations, the performance-related pay would be “strictly implemented” in 2017.In September, Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha asked the telco to consider the implementation of performance-related pay to its staff and look at increasing its market share to 15% with a timeline and stay competitive in the sector.The company, with less than a 10% market share, has 2 lakh employees on its payroll. It spent nearly Rs 15,000 crore in salaries in 2015.Growing market share to 15%, according to Shrivastava, would be a challenging task which he said could be attained in sync with the PSU’s existing revival plan.Lossmaking BSNL, which currently has around 91 million subscribers, has been unable to keep up with private sector players, slipping to No. 5 by user base over the years from its leadership position.“As part of our revival strategy, a number of new customers are boarding BSNL network and we believe that the company is in a position to deliver 15% market share,” the top executive said.The Delhi-headquartered telco has embarked on a revival strategy recently and aims to become profitable by 2018-19, after a series of consumer-centric initiatives such as Rs 49 a month tariff and free calling to any network on Sundays and between 9:00 pm and 7:00 pm on weekdays.BSNL, as part of the strategic plan, has also started discussing network sharing arrangements with private sector rivals such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Reliance Jio Infocomm. It expects to resell its unused airtime and bandwidth to mobile virtual network operators.The company is also working on improving its mobile services quality and effectively arresting call drops by expanding telecom infrastructure.“In the course of this year, we are going to put another 15,000 base transceiver stations that will help upgrade mobile network and further reduce call drops,” Shrivastava said.