After the spectrum auction, the private telecom companies have hinted about a possible tariff hike in the wake of larger bid amount they have to pay for the spectrum. This demand of the greedy private telecom companies has been endorsed by none other than Shri. Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for Communications. He has made the following statement;

‘According to TRAI estimates, each mobile user talks for 350 minutes per month on an average. With about 97 crore mobile connections, we get a figure of 4,07,400 minutes of calls a year. If you divide this by yearly payout of Rs. 5,300 crore, the load on every consumer will come to about 1.3 paise per minute. Therfore increase in tariffs is not a problem.’

Now, the hike in tariff is a forgone conclusion, the question is whether the government will be able to restrict the hike only according to the TRAI estimates.