The initiatives announced under the National Telecom Policy, including the move to abolish roaming charges, will be implemented before the term of the current Government ends in 2014, according to the Communications and IT Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal.
Addressing the media at the Economic Editors' conference, Mr Sibal said, “The key objective of NTP 2011 is to achieve full mobile number portability, one nation-free roaming, on demand broadband of at-least 100 Mbps, one licence across services and service areas, right to broadband and to reposition mobile phone as an instrument of empowerment.”
Legacy issues
“We will try to implement this during the tenure of the current Government,” he added. Telecom Ministry has been criticised for announcing a number of initiatives under the National Telecom Policy without giving any firm timelines for implementing the same.
Earlier in the day, the Department of Telecom said the uncertainty in the telecom policy will be settled over the next six months. Legacy issues related to 2G spectrum allocation, pricing and guidelines for mergers and acquisition will be finalised within this period, Mr R Chandrashekhar, Secretary Department of Telecom, said at an interactive session with the industry on Draft National Telecom Policy 2011, organised by FICCI.
“Private sector accounts for 88 per cent of the contribution made to the telecom sector and hence policy has to make sense to private sector. Most of the uncertainty related to telecom policy will be removed over the next six months,” Mr Chandrashekhar said.
He also clarified that though the NTP states that 300 Mhz of 3G spectrum will be made available by 2017 it did not mean that all of it will be released together. “2017 is the outer date by which we will make this spectrum available. The actual allocation may happen in parts over the next 5 years,” he said.
On the issue of giving preference to local manufacturers, the Secretary said that if anyone plans to carry on importing 100 per cent of their hardware requirements then they would have to rethink. “There are security concerns apart from issues related to our growing import bill. Of course, there cannot be any compromise on standard and quality but we want to see manufacturing happening in India,” Mr Chandrashekhar said.
Value-added services
On the issue of making policy for value-added services, he said that it cannot be left to the market forces to decide whether the VAS industry survives or not. He said that suitable interventions will have to be made in this segment because VAS was important to the growth of broadband. The industry representatives present during the FICCI event sought firm commitment from the Government in terms of timeline for implementing the various policy initiatives.
The industry sought clarity on a number of issues including low encryption rules, rationale for introducing uniform licence fee of 8.5 per cent, exit policy for new players and high levies paid by the operators.