Call Rates To India From Gulf To Cost More

[Karthik R 246]

NEW DELHI: More than four million Indians living in West Asian countries will have to shell out more to call their relatives back home, after telecom regulator TRAI on Thursday kicked off the process to raise the fee operators there, have to pay to bring their traffic into India.

Call tariffs to India from West Asia may soon go up by up to7 per minute if TRAI accepts the domestic telcos’ proposal. The regulator on Thursday sought inputs from domestic operators here to revise the termination charge, the fee that an operator abroad pays for bringing their traffic into India, but said the exercise will be limited to operators in West Asia.

Currently, operators like Saudi Telecom , Zain and Etisalat pay a mere 40 paise per minute for terminating their traffic in India, but on the other hand, charge their counterparts like Bharti, Reliance Communications , BSNL and Vodafone Essar around7 per minute as termination fee for calls that originate in India and terminate in the Gulf countries.

Existing Indian laws prevent operators here from charging more than 40 paise per minute as termination fee for incoming calls from abroad.

Executives with Indian operators say that TRAI decided to intervene after they had pointed out that operators here got475 crore annually from telcos in West Asia as termination fee, but paid over1,300 crore for terminating their traffic there, leading to a forex loss of825 crore. As part of the proposed solution, TRAI may allow Indian telcos to charge reciprocal termination rates, a practice followed by many other countries in the West.

According to industry data, India and West Asia international voice traffic, which is mainly led by the Persons of Indian Origin living in the Gulf countries, is around 10 billion minutes per annum. India-in traffic from West Asia is 8.5 billion and India-out traffic to West Asia is around 2.2 billion minutes.

“The India out traffic settlement cost is set by aggressive competition amongst Indian telcos whereas settlement cost in West Asia is set by the monopoly telco in each country. The West Asia charges weighted average 13 cents per minute against a competitive rate of only 1.2 cents charged by Indian international long distance operators for in-traffic from West Asian countries,” domestic operators here said in their communication to TRAI.

Indian operators have also told TRAI that increasing the termination rates for international operators would result in a ten-fold jump in government revenues. This is because, all telecom operators share a certain per cent of their total revenues with the government under different forms of levies.

“Currently, the Indian government gets30 crore from inbound settlement cost, whereas it could earn up to300 crore per annum, if the termination charges are revised. Due to higher settlement cost the cost of calling to West Asia is higher in India. As a result, Inbound traffic (from West Asia) is almost 4X outbound traffic,” operators pointed out in their communication.

Source : here

[santhoshavanoor 7]

IF India will do like this, then operators from Middle East will increase the charges, and most of the NRI's will use Voip Services to call India, that means a revenue loss for Indian Government. It will not Increase from 30 crores to 300 crores, it will decrease from 30 crores to 3 crore. I hope TRAI will not implement this law.