The government has turned down a move by
Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications (RCom) seeking premature exit from the
rural telephony scheme under the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund subsidy without fulfilling the commitment they made in 2007 while bidding to provide telecom services in urban areas.
These operators have approached the telecom ministry, which is contemplating a ban on the telecom providers - not fulfilling these commitments - from participating in the next round of bidding, expected to be launched soon.
"There is no provision for service providers to unilaterally exit from the agreement on their own," a ministry official said.
Asked whether any penalty or liquidated damages would be levied on such service providers, the official said an exit policy is being framed but no final decision has been taken in this regard.
Rural tele-density continues to be as low as about 26 per cent compared to 69 per cent penetration in urban India.
Increasing rural telephony has been the government's priority. Therefore, when the government invites new bids, it would take into consideration the need for increasing the rural tele-density and ask bidding telecom service providers to make appropriate commitments.
RCom has less than 500 base stations active out of about 8,000 committed by it.
The USO fund has a corpus of over Rs 14,000 crore. All service providers contribute to this fund, which is used to provide subsidy to operators and infrastructure providers to set up operations and offer telecom services in rural areas.
The ministry handling the fund is also planning to change the criteria in a way that operators and infrastructure providers do not exit without fulfilling their commitments and are offered subsidy accordingly.
Courtesy: Mail Today 
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