WB offers $125m to promote rural telephony: Awais
By Asad Cheema

ISLAMABAD—Minister for Information Technology Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari Tuesday said his ministry would launch a multi-billion-rupees project shortly with the help of the World Bank to accelerate growth of telecommunication in remote areas of the country.
He said the details of the Rural Telecommunications Access Project were being worked out and the World Bank had agreed to provide $ 125 million financial aid to jumpstart growth of basic telephony in the rural fold.
He made this announcement in a statement following a meeting with a four-member World Bank delegation headed by senior WB representative Ritin Singh, which met him here to discuss modalities of the project and identify areas to receive support within the telecom sector.
The minister said the amount received from the World Bank would be deposited in the Universal Service Fund (USF) as contribution by the government to bring the rural population into the mainstream of the country's economic development.
"The benefits of such an intervention would be a higher GDP growth, improved governance and poverty alleviation through enhanced economic activities and job creation.
This would also give us the advantage of not only the provision of much-needed funding into the USF to start it up, but World Banks technical assistance based on their experience of similar initiatives in other developing countries would also be available to us in the roll-out process, he added.
Awais Leghari said the government wanted to invest heavily into the rural telecommunication to bridge the access gap through output-based aid schemes as introduced earlier by many countries in South Asia, Latin America and Africa.
He said the government would use USF to extend a one-time subsidy or grant for private operators, and the subsidy would offered through bidding on a competitive basis to keep the cost as low as possible to ensure maximum private investment in achieving universal service goals. "The fund would also be used to create an atmosphere free of exclusivity rights or technology restrictions to ensure maximum advantages to the target population," he said.
He said rural tele-density in Pakistan stood at a dismal 1 per cent of the population and he was keen to take it to at least 5 per cent by 2010, which obviously required for a massive investment to put in place a proper telecom infrastructure. "We estimate this cost to be around $ 100 million and the grant being extended by the World Bank would provide us with an ideal platform to extend telecom services to the un-served areas," he said.
Earlier, Awais Leghari told the World Bank delegation Pakistan had made significant progress in telecommunication development in recent years with the overall teledensity touching 18 per cent at the back of around 40 million mobile phone subscribers. "A healthy competition in the market has resulted in various benefits for the subscribers including very low tariff, reduced cost of bandwidth, better quality and higher efficiency," he said.
The minister said the government had identified four key areas, including basic rural telephony, broadband, e-services and content development, to focus on during the roll-out of the Universal Service Fund. "Our aim is to provide at least 250,000 broadband connections and offer three major e-services within the next 12 to 18 months," he said, pointing out content creation as a key area because without content creation there would be no solid progress in the broadband proliferation which heavily relied on the availability of content in local languages.