TRAI’s just shrunk the telecom village

Telephone subscribers have so far been classified as urban or rural purely on the basis of census reports. All those who live in villages are put by the census in the rural category. This will no more be the case as the TRAI has introduced short distance charging area (SDCA), the local area of telephone service with a unique STD code, as the basis for determining whether somebody is a rural subscriber or not.

Each SDCA is typically a combination of urban and rural areas. Yet, two years ago, the Government classified the SDCAs as urban, semi-urban or rural with the object of ensuring that private basic service operators roll out their networks in equal proportion in all areas.

But out of the 2,647 SDCAs in the country, the Government then categorised only 487 as rural. In other words, less than one-fifth of the SDCAs have been categorised as rural. Since the TRAI has now decided to restrict subsidised tariff to only those residing in rural SDCAs, it means that the subscribers residing in villages in the rest of the country will soon have to pay the higher tariff of their urban counterparts.

Take for example the radical impact of the TRAI order on the village-based subscribers in the Karnal SDCA in Haryana. Thanks to their status as rural subsribers under the present system of classification, they have so far been paying a subsidised rent of Rs 50 per month and enjoying 125 free calls.

But as the Karnal SDCA is urban, the rent for everybody there will now jump to Rs 200 in keeping with the capacity of the local telephone exchange. What will further increase the monthly bill is the reduction in the number of free calls from 125 to 30.

While this may seem unfair to those living in remote villages in the so-called urban SDCAs, the TRAI order has the virtue of stopping subsidy to undeserving subscribers such as residents of ‘‘lal dora areas’’ or so-called villages in the territory of Delhi. The present census-based classification indiscriminately treats the residents of lal dora areas as rural subscribers. But since the whole of Delhi is one urban SDCA, all those ‘‘villagers’’ of the Capital will, under the new system ordered by the TRAI, be divested of the subsidy benefit.

Experts of telecom law agree with the imperative of weeding out undeserving recipients of subsidy in the telecom sector. But senior advocate Abhishek Singhvi, who has represented the Association of Basic Telecom Operators, questions the wisdom of using the SDCA route to achieve that purpose.

‘‘Just like OBC or Mandal reservations are subject to creamy layer-cut off, we have to ensure that heavily urbanised areas in so-called rural SDCAs do not get subsidy,’’ Singhvi said, adding that only a case-by-case survey by the TRAI resulting in ‘‘a new telecom map of India’’ would be truly useful.

Senior advocate C S Vaidyanathan, representing the Cellular Operators Association of India, has reservations about the TRAI’s approach for an altogether different reason. He says the Government and TRAI have ‘‘no moral authority’’ to use the rural SDCA concept to weed out existing rural subscribers: ‘‘Having failed to make private basic service providers spread their networks into rural SDCAs, the authorities are now using the same classification to penalise rural subscribers.”