Mr Kapil Sibal's innings as the Telecom Minister resembles the Indian cricket team's road to the World Cup win — a shaky start, consolidating on the wins at a later stage. Although he started his stint on the wrong foot by defending his predecessor Mr A. Raja's regime, the proposed changes in policy are in the right direction. The New Telecom Policy, the broad contours of which were revealed on Monday, is an attempt to bring sanity to a sector which has been battered by charges of corruption, criminal conspiracy and corporate rivalry. These have accumulated over the past few years and the sector needs a thorough cleansing, which is what Mr Sibal is attempting. The proposals are not new and many have been under consideration since 2003. They were not implemented because the decision-makers had other ideas, some of which had little to do with a rational and transparent set of policies. So Mr Sibal deserves credit for putting the various ideas in a single document and then going a step further by committing to finalise the new policy by year-end. When implemented, it should bring order, not least because licensing and spectrum allocation will have been streamlined. For example, the decision to de-link spectrum and licence will go a long way in resolving severe conflicts in the sector. And, even if the move to reduce the licence period from 20 to 10 years hurts operators, to a large extent the impact will be offset by other positive initiatives, such as allowing spectrum sharing and charging a uniform licence fee. In any case, given the fairly low capital investment, there is no logical reason for licences to have such a long validity period.
That said, the job is still only half done. First, the mistakes of the past have to be rectified before going forward. Operators who received licences by flouting norms and making fraudulent representations about their capabilities should be asked to go home. Second, to ensure that these sins will never be repeated, spectrum will have to be priced on market mechanics and not through mathematical calculations. A transparent system of allocating spectrum through an auction should be put in place, leaving no scope for future political masters to negotiate a package for themselves. And, finally, a policy roadmap for the next ten years should be put in place to avoid flip-flops in decision-making. All this will make the sector stable which, in the end, will benefit consumers, and operators can then focus on the market rather than spending their energies negotiating the bouncers from policy-makers.
In a larger sense, the principles on which the new policy is based could become the template for other ministries that have to figure out similar policies in respect of publicly-owned goods which have to be allotted to the private sector for efficient and fair exploitation.