ISLAMABAD, Sept 25: The Pakistan Telecommunication Limited has decided to reduce its tariff for international calls with special concession for South Asian Association for Regional Countries (Saarc) countries.

This was announced by Zahir Mohammad Khan, member operations, here at a press conference, on Wednesday.

He said the consumer price including GST for countries in group-Saarc being special relations would be Rs25 (PTCL charges Rs21.75 plus Rs3.25) per minute and for rest of the world the charges have been reduced from Rs45 to Rs39.

Mr Zahir, who was also the acting chairman PTCL said over the last one year the company had reduced its all types of tariffs by 42 per cent including the present 29 per cent reduction in international tariffs.

Under the new tariffs, minimum duration of demand calls and station to station calls shall be three minutes, adding, the new tariff would be effective from September 1, 2002.

He maintained that PTCL had introduced special prime time (day time) package of discounted rates for its valued customers on all nationwide calls but that must be made beyond 160km.

Under the special package PTCL will charge Rs 10.04 per minute as against the previous billing of Rs 13.04 per minute for radial distance exceeding 160km.

For the convenience of customers, he said, PTCL had introduced a new simplified New Telephone Connection (NTC) customers’ form that would be available in near future at our customer centres.

To a question, he said last year the PTCL achieved its target of installing 500,000 new telephone lines and hopeful that this year too the task would be achieved.

When asked as to why the PTCL has closed down its customer service, he said, since pay phone industry was in place therefore it was no more a profitable business.