Draft telecom policy will be out this week

Draft telecom policy will be out this week

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 12:25 AM IST
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NTP to present growth roadmap for sector

New Delhi : The Department of Telecom (DoT) is likely to float a draft of the new National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2018 within a week for public comments, an official source told PTI. “The draft (of the NTP 2018) is very likely to be issued within a week,” said the source, who is closely associated with policy draft formulation.

 The NTP 2018 is expected to present a growth road map of the Indian telecom sector, which is reeling under a financial stress, for next five years. The Economic Survey 2017-18 tabled in Parliament last week noted that the telecom sector is going through stress due to a huge debt pile, tariff war and irrational spectrum costs and called for policy measures to minimise over-bidding of assets during auctions. Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan last month had said the government would look at positioning the telecom sector primarily as an enabler to boost the economy rather than a revenue earner under the new NTP. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has recommended road map for NTP 2018 that should be able to address global requirements and attract investments of about $100 billion by 2022.

The regulator said the NTP 2018 must facilitate ease of doing business via simplification of licensing and regulatory frameworks, rationalisation of taxes, levies and related compliances, and facilitating availability of resources, including spectrum. Trai recommended that under the new policy, the telecom sector must generate 20 lakh jobs, achieve 900 million broadband subscriptions with download speeds of 2 Mbps and connect all gram panchayats with at least 1 gigabit per second wireless broadband by 2022. Trai reiterated its long pending demand of putting in place an ombudsman based consumer grievance redressal mechanism “by end of 2018”. The draft was to be out by end-December or early January.

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