In order to bridge the affordability gap for the persons residing in rural areas and in line with government’s announcement of incentivizing digital payment, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has suggested that a reasonable amount of free access to data services around 100MB should be provided to rural subscribers on monthly basis.
TRAI has also suggested that the implementation cost of such schemes may be met from Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF). Under USOF, the government charges a cess in the form of Universal Access Levy from telecom licencees to fund setting up of telecom infrastructure in all uncovered rural and remote areas of the country.
The telecom regulator has said that to increase participation of other entities for incentivising free data, there is a need to introduce third party, or aggregator, to facilitate schemes that are telecom service operator agnostic. It further said that any scheme for provision of free data must be telecom operator agnostic and must not involve any arrangement between the TSP (telecom service provider) and the aggregator or content provider. It should not be designed to circumvent its regulation on free mobile internet services as mentioned under 'The Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations'.
Meanwhile, the regulator has suggested that the aggregator providing this scheme will need to register with Department of Telecom (DoT) and the validity of the registration shall be five years. TRAI in February barred differential pricing on Internet which ended services of platforms like Facebook's Free Basics and Airtel Zero. The regulator in May also released a consultation paper on free data services.