LIRNEasia » Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund http://lirneasia.net a regional ICT policy and regulation think tank active across the Asia Pacific Fri, 25 May 2012 02:42:29 +0000 en hourly 1 LIRNEasia engages in act of “social corporate responsibility”! http://lirneasia.net/2008/10/lirneasia-engages-in-act-of-social-corporate-responsibility/ http://lirneasia.net/2008/10/lirneasia-engages-in-act-of-social-corporate-responsibility/#comments Thu, 02 Oct 2008 06:18:47 +0000 Nirmali Sivapragasam http://lirneasia.net/?p=2558 Large corporations engage in acts of Corporate Social Responsibility.  Non-profit organizations like ours sometimes engage in acts of Social Corporate Responsibility.   SCR differs from CSR because the beneficiary here is a corporation.  We recognize that large corporations can affect the course of events in countries and in some cases, the world.   Therefore, when a large corporation with massive resources asked us to help educate their senior managers (especially those in charge of CSR) about key issues in telecom, we agreed. 

Here are four one-pager briefs that were prepared for this purpose:  the topics were Underserved areas; access and backbone networks, spectrum and  ICT4D in South Asia (excluding India).

]]> http://lirneasia.net/2008/10/lirneasia-engages-in-act-of-social-corporate-responsibility/feed/ 0 India’s Budget Impact on Universal Service Obligation http://lirneasia.net/2005/03/307/ http://lirneasia.net/2005/03/307/#comments Tue, 01 Mar 2005 12:29:00 +0000 Payal Malik http://www.lirneasia.net/2005/03/307/ By Payal Malik

In his budget speech the Finance Minister of India promised a release of Rs. 1,200 crores (USD 275 million) for the Universal Service Fund. While it is heartening that the funds are being released and are not being gobbled by the Contingency Fund of India, what is however disheartening is that competition and liberalisation has not achieved its full potential in bridging the rural urban divde and like in the monopoly era one has to wait for budgetary pronouncements for rural telephony to jumpstart. An extract from his speech:

Telecommunication is the best way to provide connectivity in urban and rural India. By the end of January 2005, we had achieved a tele-density of 8.75 per cent. However, we are concerned with the low tele-density in rural areas. So far, Government has released Rs.1,700 crore to the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund, which has been fully utilized. A provision of Rs.1,200 crore has been made for 2005-06. 1,687 subdivisions will get support under the USO Fund for rural household telephones. 5.20 lakh village public telephones (VPTs) have been installed so far, and BSNL has undertaken to provide VPTs in the next three years to the remaining 66,822 revenue villages

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