Role of Universal Service Obligation Fund in Rural Telecom Services: Lessons from the Indian Experience

Rekha Jain;G. Raghuram

No 2009-06-03, IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department

Abstract: Despite the tremendous growth of mobile services in most developing countries, these have largely remained limited to urban areas. This has further aggravated the existing urban and rural divide. Policy makers and regulators perceive the need for an effective regulatory and policy environment to reduce the gap, as there are several market challenges in this endeavor, including low commercial viability. However, most such interventions have had little success. This paper outlines India.s experience of increasing rural teledensity, including its recent policy initiative to increase penetration through creation of a Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) that supported a variety of innovative initiatives. USOF.s most ambitious program to date had been the design and deployment of mobile services in rural areas.

Date: 2009-06-26
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2009-06-03Jain.pdf English Version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iim:iimawp:2009-06-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().