The arrival of Kapil Sibal in the Communications Ministry has saved Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications (RCom) a huge sum of money payable as penalty.
Sibal has whittled down the penalty of Rs 50 crore per circle proposed by the administrator of the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) to a few lakhs for violating its contract to provide mobile services in rural areas. For 13 circles, the fine could have added up to Rs 650 crore.
The USOF is a fund used to subsidise rural telephony. Telecom operators can bid for providing this service, and even ask for subsidies. But RCom bid aggressively for many USOF clusters even without subsidies, and later found them unviable and switched off without the USOF Administrator’s permission.
Under an agreement dated 16 May, 2007, RCom had agreed to provide this service from base transceiver stations (BTSs) in 53 clusters (5,118 sites). As on 30 November 2010, RCom and its sister company Reliance Telecom had commissioned 3,205 BTSs.
No comments:
Post a Comment