When the money's pouring in, why waste time counting, right? That, it appears, is also the philosophy of the government-owned BSNL, the Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). From May 2003, the TRAI decreed that BSNL was to be paid a cess (Access Deficit Charge, or ADC) by users of telecom services each time they made/received a long distance call. While the initial estimates were Rs 13,518 crore would be collected in the first year, this was scaled down to Rs 5,340 crore, and is currently Rs 3,335 crore. Problem is, no one has the details of the actual amount collected "" neither BSNL, the DoT or the TRAI. In a reply to a Parliament question last month asking for details of ADC collections, the minister of state for telecom said, "BSNL was not measuring Intra Network minutes ... Therefore, the exact amount of ADC collected ... since its inception ... is not maintained." The ADC, going by the TRAI's estimates, works out to around 15 per cent of all long distance and mobile revenues since 2003, and no one has a record of the actual collections!
