Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said on Thursday that the current access deficit charge of 11 per cent must be brought down to lower the tariffs and enable the sector achieve higher mobile growth like China.

The ADC is paid by operators to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd mainly to undertake rural telephony services and currently stands at Rs 5000 crore (Rs 50 billion) a year.

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"Unless you bring down ADC from the current level, pushing growth in the mobile segment would be difficult. ADC must come down to introduce lower tariffs and unless tariffs go down further, the kind of growth happened in China will not happen in India", TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal told newspersons in New Delhi.

"Last year, there were 13 million mobiles... Today there are 47 million. Obviously there is space for reducing ADC," Baijal said, adding that with such volumes, margins are with the operators therefore the government and operators must work towards bringing down tariffs.

He, however, declined to quantify the reduction and said prejudging the cuts was not possible.

Asked whether the cut will be across the network or certain segments like national long distance, local or international, he said even today ADC is differential on different calls. Therefore the reduction will be differential on different calls, Baijal said.

The TRAI chairman also said that not just ADC, even Universal Service Obligation or USO and revenue share paid by operators to the government must also come down.

"In the unified license penultimate recommendations, we have recommended that," he said.

"We have a strong case for that. If you reduce the revenue-share, the addressable market will be higher and the government would be compensated by growth rather than a revenue," he said, adding the present finance minister is very supportive of this idea.

To a reply on how much cut should be considered, he said, "that is in the domain of the finance minister."

Currently, the telecom sector is taxed at the highest -- 10 per cent service tax, five per cent USO, 6-10 per cent revenue share and 11 per cent ADC.

Baijal also favoured bringing down the cost of spectrum and bandwidth in rural areas.

Asked whether TRAI's nod to operators allowing them to offer differential tariffs on their own and other networks would encourage predatory pricing, Baijal said, "The tariffs are to be decided by the market. We will not allow predatory pricing. And this decision was taken three months back. We notified it only yesterday (Wednesday). Before three months, it was not allowed and we had disallowed the proposals of Reliance and BSNL."