Date:14/02/2006 URL: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2006/02/14/stories/2006021402560100.htm

Back ADC collections exceed target, cross Rs 8,000 cr

Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi , Feb. 13

BSNL may have received more money by way of access deficit charges than was intended, due to a steep increase in the call traffic.

According to estimates being made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the amount collected may well have crossed Rs 8,000 crore against an initial estimate of Rs 5,000 crore.

According to the traffic data collected by the telecom regulator, the entire industry had contributed as much as Rs 6,500 crore as early as September 2005. This has only gone up since then.

While the TRAI had earlier estimated an inflow of Rs 2,562 crore from fixed line telephone operators, the ADC collected was in excess of Rs 3,400 crore.

While the mobile sector was expected to contribute around Rs 1,100 crore during the entire year, in actual terms the amount had gone up to nearly Rs 1,400 crore by the middle of last year.

The amount collected from international long-distance has gone up to Rs 1,450 crore compared to an estimate of Rs 1,300 crore.

ADC is a levy imposed by the telecom regulator in order to subsidise telephone services in rural areas. Most part of the fund collected goes to BSNL. The charges are levied on a per minute basis on every call.

The TRAI had estimated that the total ADC collected would be around Rs 5,000 crore. But a steep fall in tariffs has not only increased the subscriber base exponentially, but the volumes too.

Minutes of usage per subscriber have been going up over the last few months, leading to substantial increase in the ADC kitty. The increase in traffic will allow the telecom regulator to bring down the charges drastically.

The TRAI is very close to announcing the new ADC regime in which it proposes to change the way of collecting the charges as a percentage of the revenue earned by the operator rather than loading it on to every call made by the subscriber.