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The Telecom Ministry will spend up to Rs 5,000 crore from the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund to give subsidy to telecom operators for providing broadband services in rural areas of the country.
The size of the tender will be between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 crore, a source close to the development said.
USO fund was set up in 2002 to provide mobile services and broadband connectivity in rural and remote areas of the country. At the end of FY’11, the fund had a total of Rs 16,803.84 crore in its corpus.
Resources for the USO fund are raised through a universal service levy which at present has been fixed at 5 per cent of the adjusted gross revenue of all telecom service providers except the pure value-added service providers like Internet, voice mail, email service providers etc.
The Ministry has already floated the draft tender seeking comments from various stakeholders.
“Department has received comments from almost every telecom operator and the associations and the Ministry will proceed to float the tender as quickly as possible,” the source added.
Under the ‘Rural Wireline Broadband’ scheme of USO fund, a total of 2,61,413 broadband connections and 2,506 kiosks have been provided till January 31, 2011, in the rural and remote areas.
Last month, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had objected to making state-run BSNL as the execution body for the national broadband plan. TRAI had said this in its recommendations on NBP that have been submitted to the Telecom Ministry.
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