The new National Telecom Policy should aim at enabling wireless broadband access at affordable prices to 90% of the population while attracting investments worth $100 billion by 2022, telecom regulator TRAI said on Friday.
In its recommendations on the objectives, mission and vision for the new policy, the regulator said the policy should aim at creating two million additional jobs in the ICT sector by 2022.
The recommendations follow a DoT letter in August last year, requesting the authority to give its policy inputs for formulation of National Telecom Policy 2018, post which discussions were held with stakeholders, including telecom service providers (TSPs), equipment manufacturers, IT companies and content providers. The government aims to finalise the NTP 2018 by March end.
Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said the policy, which it suggested should be called the ‘Information and Communication Technology Policy 2018’, should put in place an ombudsman-based consumer grievance redressal mechanism by end of 2018.
Other objectives recommended include simplifying licensing and regulatory frameworks, rationalising taxes, levies and related compliances by 2019, putting in place a flexible, robust data protection regime powered by a strong encryption policy by 2019 and establishing a policy framework for facilitating setting up of data centres by 2019.
Rajan Mathews, Director General at COAI said it “strongly supports” suggestions on simplifying the licensing and regulatory frameworks and expects that the same would be done this year itself. “We hope that the simplification of compliance includes reduction in the multiple audits, which will save the cost and efforts of the operators,” he said.
Pointing out that to achieve the targets recommended by the regulator, huge investments would be required by the TSPs, COAI said there was a need for creating “a stable, predictable, innovation and investment-friendly regulatory and policy environment”.
The regulator also highlighted the need for formulating a strategy to attract investments worth $60 billion into the sector by 2020 and $100 billion by 2022 and leapfrog into the top-50 nations in international rankings.
TRAI, in its recommendations, said the objective of the policy would also be to provide 1Gbps data connectivity to all gram panchayats to enable wireless broadband services to inhabitants by 2022.
Further, the policy should look at setting up two million public WLANs, including Wi-Fi hotspots, in the country by 2020 and five million by 2022. One of the objectives should also be to enable access for connecting to one million Internet of Things/Machine-to-Machine sensors/devices by 2020 and five million by 2022.
TRAI also made a case for establishing by 2019 a single window clearance mechanism, via online centralised platform, for providing Right of Way permission.
