The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) plans to spend upto Rs 50 billion from the Universal Service Obligation fund (USOF). This amount will be provided as subsidy to operators for providing broadband services in rural areas.
The size of the tender is expected to be between Rs 20 and Rs 50 billion. At the end of 2010-11, the USOF had a total of Rs 168.03 billion in its corpus.
The resources for USOF are raised through a universal service levy (USL), which is currently fixed at 5 per cent of the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) of all operators, except the pure value added service providers.
DoT has already floated the draft tender, seeking comments from various stakeholders.
