DoT considering specialised bank for telecom infra

Plan involves moving $30 b from ‘service obligation fund’

The Department of Telecommunications is considering a recommendation made earlier by the industry to set up a specialised bank for the telecom sector. To begin with, the bank will have a corpus of about $30 billion that will be transferred from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF).

“At the time when DoT was formulating the National Telecom Policy 2018, we had made a recommendation that the excess amount in the USOF be put in a specialised bank that lends specifically to the telecom industry,” Rajan S Mathews, Director-General of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India, told BusinessLine on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress 2019, here.