When it comes to telecommunication gadgets, obsolescence is measured in months rather than years, not to mention decades. That was not the case with governance in the telecom industry, considering that the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885 is still the law that applies to the use of telephones, telegraph, and communications across the land. But the 2G scam has laid bare the disastrous consequences of persisting with an outdated and ambiguous policy framework, which a succession of Telecommunications Ministers handled questionably and which A. Raja used to scandalous effect, resulting in the biggest scam in the history of independent India. It is not difficult to see why this industry needs a periodically fine-tuned policy regime. India's telephone-using population is swelling phenomenally: it took a hundred years for the number of telephone subscribers to touch 20 million; now 20 million subscribers are added every month. The mode of connectivity has changed: 96 per cent of the 826 million subscribers use mobiles, which were unseen just 16 years ago. Indeed, even among the wireless services that became available in the 1990s, pagers and mobile radio trunking phones, which ranked quite prominently in the New Telecom Policy of 1999, have passed into oblivion. The value of the wireless spectrum has skyrocketed in consonance with the number of subscribers connected.
It is hardly surprising that post-scam, Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal wants to draft a new telecom policy to replace the one that was set 12 years ago. Mr. Sibal does not have some of the challenges NTP 1999 faced, especially the challenge of increasing the tele-density in the country. The industry has over-delivered on targets, with 154 phones today for 100 people in urban areas and 30 phones (against a target of four) for every 100 people in rural India. But Mr. Sibal needs skillfully to draft the policy in a manner that will let consumers continue to enjoy the benefits of low tariffs and of access to the latest technologies. Ensuring that there is a sufficient number of service providers competing in each area will take care of the former. Mr. Sibal has talked of having a minimum of six, but that is no problem for now since most areas have almost twice that number of service providers. He has also talked of granting a unified licence, which one trusts will be agnostic to technology choice. This will be crucial in letting companies offer their subscribers the benefit of technology as it changes and improves. But the more intractable issue will be that of spectrum and its pricing, given the proliferation of mobile devices and the increased demand on the air waves. Mr. Sibal wants to separate the issue of the telecom licence from the grant of spectrum. Yet that does not solve the problem fully. Since spectrum is commonly owned but scarce, a transparent mechanism must be devised to let phone companies pay the appropriate price to the government for the slices they use. That was the issue that trapped Mr. Raja; let not his successors also trip on it.
