DoT to deploy Rs 16K cr for rural telecom

Telecom Minister A Raja held a meeting with Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of 17 telecom companies. The meeting centered on increasing broadband penetration and reducing mobile voice tariffs further. CNBC-TV18’s Siddharth Zarabi reports.

Below is a verbatim transcript of his comments on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

It was a well attended meeting with three points of discussion. The first was about how telecom operators can achieve higher growth in rural India, which are underserved areas both through broadband as well as the provision of cheap voice services. For this, there was a discussion that centered on a reduction in mobile termination charge. Currently, the minister feels that there is a scope for a 5 paise reduction at least in the mobile termination charge. This will impact some of the larger operators who have a lot of traffic terminating on their network.

There was a disussion on the utilization of universal service obligation (USO) fund which was valued at Rs 16,000 crore. There is already a move to provide subsidy from this fund for rural tower that was discussed at this meeting. At this point of time, we can say that a couple of issues have been discussed. It is more of a confidence building measure with the industry as there is a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe on certain actions of the Department of Telecom (DoT). So to some effect, this meeting and the discussion there centered on showing that the key points about the telecom growth continue to be the focus of the Communications Ministry. The industry will respond as the government is able to reduce some of the charges like the mobile termination charge in consultation with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).