Telecom giant BSNL is negotiating with leading private operators to enter into tower sharing agreement, a move that would help the ailing PSU to turnaround.

"We are in talks with various service providers in order to make arrangement so that we can share our idle tower infrastructure with them and generate revenues in order to make our bottomline healthy," BSNL CMD R K Upadhyay said without naming any of the telecom service provider.

The telecom behemoth is suffering from financial losses due to huge labour wage cost and declining subscribers.

Upadhyay further said, "This (tower sharing pact) will take time as many decisions needs to be taken like rent issue and duration of rented towers. I expect this will be done within this fiscal year."

Sources in the know said that BSNL is in talks with Bharti airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications for this purpose.

"We are also looking to unlock the value of our idle real estate which will again be helpful to make our bottomline positive," Upadhyay added.

State-run service provider has over 50,000 towers across the country. BSNL has tower sharing pacts with Tata Teleservices and Aircel.

BSNL, once the country?s flagship telecom company, posted a net loss of Rs 1,823 crore on revenue of Rs 32,046 crore in 2009-2010. The company had net profit of over Rs 10,000 crore in 2005-06.

In its projections to the government, BSNL is expected to to post a net loss of Rs 2,725 crore on revenue of Rs 31,738 crore during 2010-11, and the loss is expected to narrow to Rs 623 crore on revenue of Rs 36,569 crore during the current fiscal year (2011-12).

After defence and railways, BSNL is the country?s largest landholder. Its properties span 3,500 towns across India worth thousands of crores, making it one of the largest state-owned companies in terms of land assets.

The PSU has slipped from number two position in number of telecom subscribers to number four in view of intense competition from the private players.

The PSU has a big handicap of not being present in India's top two markets -- Delhi and Mumbai -- as in these two metros another PSU MTNL operates.