Solon seeks telco ‘fees’ on health, education

Proposed bill supports current voice, SMS rates

MANILA, Philippines – Manila Representative Congresswoman Maria Theresa Bonoan-David has filed a bill seeking to mandate telecommunications firms to allot a portion of their revenues for health and education programs for children.

House Bill 6179, entitled “Ten Percent Allocating Act of 2009,” mandates that 10 percent of telcos’ gross revenue earnings should be remitted to the Food and Education Acceleration Program (FEAP) that she said will be established by the Department of Education (DepEd) and the Department of Health.

Fees collected will be used for building classrooms, computer and science laboratories, cafeterias, school clinics vaccination, school feeding, and acquisition of various learning materials.

The amount should also be used to hire new teachers, augmenting pay of existing faculty, scholarship grants.

Bonoan-David (4th District, Manila) is also supporting regular rates for calls and text messaging.

“The bill proposes that instead of merely lowering the cost of communication through lowered access charges, current rates should be maintained, but with the government collecting ten percent of the gross revenue, to be used to open greater opportunities to improve education for the country’s youth and promote proper nutrition among school children,” Bonoan-David said.

By her own estimates, Bonoan-David said telcos collect an average of P539 million per day, assuming each of the 53.9 million mobile phone subscribers are sending at least 10 text messages per day.

But she was citing a 2007 figure wherein there were only 53.9 million mobile phone subscribers.

As of May this year, Smart Communications and its sister brand TNT reported a combined 38 million mobile subscribers. Globe Telecom also reported that it has 25.7 million subscribers during the same period.

Sun Cellular, meanwhile, has an estimated nine million subscribers. This raises the total to around 70 million mobile phone subscribers.

Representatives from the telecommunications firms have yet to respond to the proposal. –Alexander Villafania, INQUIRER.net