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Our Bureau

New Delhi , May 21

TELEPHONE subscribers in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh will now be able to make calls to a mobile user anywhere within the State at local call charges. This comes as a result of the Government's decision to permit direct connectivity between these states and their respective capital cities, which until now was treated as a separate licence area.

This means a cell-to-cell or a fixed-to-cell call between Vellore and Chennai, for instance, will be a local call. Until now, since Chennai was considered to be a separate circle from the remaining part of Tamil Nadu, a Vellore-to-Chennai call was treated like an STD call. Similarly a call between Pune and Mumbai and between Kharagpur and Kolkata will also now become a local call.

In the case of Uttar Pradesh, the State was divided into two circles - UP (West) and UP (East) - for offering telephone services. With today's policy announcement, subscribers in Lucknow, which is in UP (East), can make a call to Agra in UP (West) at local call rates.

The decision does not have any implication for telephone users residing in other States since the problem of having another circle within a circle was unique to these four States only. This difference arose due to historical reasons. Licenses for mobile services were first granted in the metro cities of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. Subsequently, mobile services licenses were granted in telecom circles. Thus, there is separate mobile service licence for metro cities and their corresponding remaining parts of the States.

Announcing the policy decision, Mr Dayanidhi Maran, Minister for Communication and IT, said, "The Government has decided to remove this difference in pubic interest. However, the access providers will operate within their existing licensed service areas and shall not be permitted to create infrastructure outside their licensed service areas for the purpose of inter-service area connectivity. The access providers may take lease lines for such connectivity. This inter-service area connectivity shall be only for terminating traffic."

This also simplifies the dialling procedure for calls within these States as subscribers would not be required to prefix "0".

Welcoming the initiative Mr T.V. Ramachandran, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India, said, "This decision is an important step in demolishing artificial barriers between service areas. We hope that the second step of extending this facility to all other service areas across the country would be taken soon. The liberalisation of connectivity between all circles would create an important launching pad for the industry's objective of reaching 200 million mobile subscribers by 2007."

AirTel, which has operations across all the four States and the metro cities, announced that it was waiving even the roaming charges for its subscribers. This could become an issue with smaller operators such as BPL, which may not be able to match the offer on roaming since it does not have licence for Chennai while it has operations in Tamil Nadu.

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