Your phone bill will soon be much less

Further telecom tariff reduction is on the anvil as department of telecom is in the process of issuing direction to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to come out with the revenue-share based access deficit charge.

 "The government will soon ask TRAI to make a shift in its policy decision, so that we can have ADC by revenue share… if we make ADC a revenue-share, lot of problems will disappear," Dayandhi Maran, Minister of Telecommunications said at the India Economic Summit.

Access deficit charge, a levy on private players for compensating BSNL for its unprofitable operations is currently collected on per call basis and is flawed with pushing call rates and lacking transparency as it is applied on per call basis.

ADC component on incoming ISD calls, which accounts for nearly Rs 2000 crore (Rs 20 billion) of the total Rs 5000 crore (Rs 50 billion) to BSNL, would be a major issue to tackle in the revenue-share based ADC.

Depending upon the revenue-share percentage, the ADC amount may fall or remain static at the Rs 5000 crore level.

TRAI in its consultation paper on ADC had mooted a shift to revenue-share based ADC last year and BSNL had opposed such a move fearing reduction in amount.

But revenue-share as a method of collection will lead to lesser impact of the levy on call charges as it will be calculated on the total revenue than on every call at present.

The government has already made its intention clear on the jurisdiction over ADC saying, "Department of telecom has the right to stake claim on the jurisdiction of ADC as DoT is responsible formulating and implementing telecom policies in the country to provide affordable communications and ADC is a key instrument for doing that".