TRAI has recently come out with its recommendations on Growth of Telecom services in Rural India (www.trai.gov.in). It is an insightful attempt to address the anomalies of the current universal service obligation (USO) regime for the provision of rural telephone subsidy. In this article I describe the main lacunae of the current USO policy and outline how TRAI’s proposals ameliorate these flaws; the interested reader is directed to an independent research study that reviewed the current rural telephony subsidy mechanism. (read more…)