Tags:
Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, AUG 31: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) today announced proposals to drastically slash cellphone rentals and airtime rates and allow free incoming calls on cellphones by November 1, as reported by The Indian Express on August 28. The TRAI has proposed that rentals be reduced to Rs 475 per month for cellphones (present Rs 600) with peak airtime being slashed to Rs 4 per minute (currently Rs 6).
The cuts announced by TRAI have come in the wake of the Government allowing revenue sharing to cellphone operators instead of the earlier licence fees that they were supposed to pay.
The TRAI today released their proposed rates on which detailed consultations would be held at an open house meeting scheduled for September 7. Following this, the TRAI will announce a final tariff package depending on the response received from private operators, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), consumer groups and other parties interested to participate. Only after this process is completed will the TRAI announce the actual final cuts in rates.
The proposed cut in rental and outgoing call charge will be subject to review by Government when the revenue sharing package comes before the new Parliament after 13th Lok Sabha elections, TRAI chairman Justice S S Sodhi told newspersons while releasing a consultation paper on the matter.
Under the new tariff package, instead of cellphone users paying airtime on their cellphones, the party making the call to the cellphone would pay a higher charge (called the Calling Party Principle or CPP), for using a `premium’ service.
The TRAI had earlier proposed to introduce CPP from August 1, in its earlier telecom tariff order in March last. However, it has been rescheduled to be operational from November 1 as software changes in the the telephone exchanges across the country need to be made.
In the much awaited CPP, the authority has proposed a maximum of Rs 2.40 for a two-minute call from a fixed line to cellular phone and Rs 1.20 for every additional two minutes call. People unwilling to have the facility for making the higher charged calls to cellphones, would be given the option to bar their phones from making these calls.
When questioned why did the TRAI insist on dubbing calls from a normal landline phone to a cellphone a `premium’ service and charge a high CPP when operators in Calcutta were prepared to give the incoming call free on the cellphones without demanding a share in revenue from the basic phone operator (DoT), B K Zutshi, vice-chairman of TRAI, explained that the TRAI’s proposals were cost-based and aimed at a long-term view on developing the sector, not for “short-term gimmicks by companies”.
T V Ramachandran, vice-chairman of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) while welcoming the cuts in rentals and airtime rates said that several issues had remained unaddressed by the TRAI paper — access charges and the share in the revenue from calls made from a cellphone to a normal landline phone.
S C Khanna, secretary general of the Association of Basic Telecom Operators (ABTO), said that they were happy with the package especially the hiked share of 50 per cent in the CPP revenue for the basic service operators which was originally only 15 per cent.
