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The Department of Telecom may impose a penalty on Reliance Communications for switching off some of the base stations it had rolled out as part of the Universal Services Obligation scheme.
RCom had signed the agreement with the USO fund for rolling out mobile network in unconnected villages. But the company allegedly switched off some of the network sites on grounds that it was unviable to operate the services.
Penalty
DoT has now decided that a penalty specified under the USO scheme should be imposed on the company for shutting down some of the base station without any notice.
While the department wanted to impose the penalty as per the provisions of the Unified Access licence, the Minister of Communications and IT has told DoT to collect the fine under the provisions of the USO agreement. This means a lower penalty because under the unified access licence, the company would have had to pay Rs 50 crore as fine, while under the USO scheme the penalty works out to be only Rs 500 for each day and deduction in USO subsidy on a pro-rate basis.
Action taken
Reliance has since switched on the all the sites despite claims of high cost of operation.
“All sites in rural areas established under the USO scheme are fully functional again after restoration with minimal disruption period. We are in discussions with DoT regarding the feasibility of operating some of these sites to ensure the optimal utilisation of network infrastructure under current market conditions of higher levels of penetration in some of these USO areas. We are confident that our request to DOT to ensure commercially viable operations ensuring the mandatory obligations would be evaluated on merit,” said a RCom spokesperson.
The USO scheme was launched in 2008 to connect nearly 2 lakh villages by rolling out 7,800 towers.
The scheme received massive response from the mobile operators.
The bids received from the operators were so aggressive that the outgo from the USO fund was scaled down by more than 50 per cent.
In some cases, operators offered to pay the Government for being allowed to offer mobile services instead of taking money from the fund. But when it came to rolling out services, operators found the going tough in some areas.
As a result, even after three years there are still some towers yet to be rolled out.
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