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In the last 10 years, mobile tariff rates have come down by 95 per cent in terms of voice calls and 97 per cent in terms of data, Minister of Telecommunications, Jyotiraditya Scindia said here on Monday.
“The tariff in India has come down from 51 paise to 3 paise which is a 95 per cent drop. One GB of Internet bandwidth has gone down from ₹297 per GB to ₹8.7 per GB over 10 years, which is 97 per cent drop. On the other hand, moving from 3G to 4G and 4G to 5G, telcos have undertaken a capex of ₹4.26 lakh crore just only over the last two fiscals. If you put in more investments there has to be a return,” Scindia said when asked about tariff increase impact on affordability of mobile services.
In July, the three private telecom operators, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio (Jio) and Vodafone-Idea (Vi), had increased entry-level tariffs by 11-25 per cent. Airtel and Vi have increased their entry-level tariffs more than 100 per cent in the last three years from about ₹99 to ₹199, for around a month long use of mobile service.
Post tariff increase in July, BSNL has seen a surge of over 29.47 lakh subscribers while the three private telecom operators together lost 38.65 lakh mobile customers.
A robust sector
“Our telecom sector is a robust sector, a sector where we have four players. There are very few countries in the world that have four players within the telecom sector in their country alone, India is one of them and I look at a very strong telecom sector also, moving forward... I would certainly hope that BSNL also has a very strong role to play in that,” Scindia said while speaking on achievements in the first 100 days of the third term of the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He also said that around 36,000 mobile towers for BSNL 4G services have been installed adding that BSNL will complete the installation of one-lakh towers for 4G service by mid-2025.
When asked about the financial health of the telecom sector after the Supreme Court rejected Vi’s petition on adjusted gross revenue (AGR), Scindia said that the sector is extremely robust with four players.
“The judgement of the Hon’ble Supreme Court has just come out. It has been a couple of days. At this point in time, whatever the Supreme Court has ordained, according to that the process has to be executed. We are still going through the process of examining that and see what the repercussion of that is going to be,” Scindia added.
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