Dot To Expedite Oneindia

[abhay 0]

Department of Telecom has formed a three-member committee to prepare a report for expediting Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran's grand vision of 'One-India' calling rate that may see STD tariffs falling further under a two-slab tariff structure.

The group headed by Advisor (Production) will submit its report early next month. The group would take a look at the views of operators who have already put their position on the same, as well as the licensing (amendment) requirements, to the Telecom Secretary after which Maran would have a look in to it, sources said.

There could be two-separate tariff slabs - for intra and inter-circle. It may so mean that a call from Delhi-to-Mizoram may cost the same as a call from Delhi-to-Patna under IndiaOne (taking into account interconnect, ADC and other charges) and local calls will be kept at the current level.

Before implementing on all-India level, the One-India tariffs may be tried out at the four regional levels. Under this, a call within northern zone will have One-India tariffs while calling to a number in other zones like east, west or south will attract the standard (existing) calling rates.

The expediency is there as Maran is keen that the new tariff is put in place before the end of the fiscal.

The preliminary work of making a roadmap has started, since the task involves a lot of execution-level work, that may include licensing amendment and also ensuring that in its attempt to do away with the distance based tariffs, local call rates of 1.20 a minute (including rural areas) are not jacked up.

Maran is so keen on the concept that he himself is also drawing a parallel blueprint of 'IndiaOne' and once the group's report is submitted to him, both the reports will be analysed to workout the implementation, they said.

The government is also confronted with a slew of other problems. As only national long distance operators are currently allowed to carry inter-circle calls, licenses must be reworked. Also, not all operators have national licenses. Besides, operators will have to rework their interconnection agreements.

BSNL has already indicated that IndiaOne may cost it by over Rs 1000 crore but is hopeful that volume pick-up due to low STD tariffs would offset the losses.

A step towards this was taken few months back when DoT did away with dialling zero (STD code) between eight circles -- Chennai and Tamil Nadu, Mumbai and Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh East and Uttar Pradesh West and Kolkata and West Bengal.

Cellular operators have stated that IndiaOne as a single 'affordable' inter-circle STD tariff is welcome.

CDMA operators like Reliance Infocomm and Tatas have suggested a Rs 100 crore entry fee for direct connectivity between two circles, saying it was necessary to maintain a level-playing field under IndiaOne. Both Reliance Infocomm and the Tatas are NLD players.