Making the case for withdrawing the 5 per cent USO charge, Akhil Gupta, Bharti Enterprises group managing director, said first the government should utilise the existing unused funds and then if needed re-impose the charge. Bharti Enterprises runs the country’s largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel.
Gupta added the USO fund wasn’t required as the operators did not require subsidy anymore and this was evident in the recently held bidding projects for rural areas by the government where the players had bid in the negative —meaning instead of seeking subisidy they were interested in paying the government if awarded with the projects.
Making a case for better utilisation of the USO fund, Kuldeep Goyal, chairman and managing director of state-owned BSNL, said in India, like in other countries, the corpus should lie with the regulator rather than being credited to a consolidated fund.
Emphasising that the whole debate on rural penetration is centered around increasing connectivity in the rural areas and making telephony accessible to the rural masses, Rajat Mukarji, chief corporate affairs officer, Idea Cellular Ltd, said the services had to be made cheaper and that would in itself spur the usage and consequently result in innovative application. He said the operators did not need to have a separate blue print for rural telephony as had often been said.
Pegging the tariff pricing as the single-most important factor along with value-added services in the rural areas, Anil Sardana, Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL) managing director, said while in urban India the telephony cost was around 2 per cent of the income, in the hinterland it was as high as 14 per cent and this differential of almost 12 per cent had to be bridged.
... contd.
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