Reliance Communications and BSNL have bagged a major part of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund-sponsored rural mobile services project.

Reliance Communications and BSNL have bagged a major part of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund-sponsored rural mobile services project. While Reliance will roll out mobile services in 72 village clusters, BSNL will do so in 58 clusters.

Earlier, DoT had invited bids for offering mobile services in 250,000 villages which were divided into 81 clusters. Of the seven telecom companies that had bid for the project, DoT selected three operators per cluster. The government will give Rs 8 billion annually to the successful bidders.