New Telecom Policy for India

New Telecom Policy for India

In what appears to be an “exciting” new phase of Indian Telecom, the planning department has donned their thinking caps and decided to adopt a new telecom policy. Frequent revisions are good enough if the previous policies dictated the regulatory regime correctly. If I can read the tea leaves correctly, I foresee each on the operators to form a cartel, BSNL and MTNL sold off and TRAI to become emasculated and more ineffectual.

Fair enough. The media as usual is ga ga over it. As if it is really going to be some earth shaking announcement. I really wonder whether these ministers ever thought of paying their own bills which run in excess of lakhs.

Frankly, in my humble opinion, I strongly believe that quality of services needs to be brought to the fore. There have been too many complaints against the service providers. Why aren’t they mentioned in the newspapers? One reason- advertising. Most of the service providers have huge ad spends….the newspapers are much better off not reporting the problems faced by ordinary customers to rectify billing complaints or deficiency in services. Perhaps even the vague calls that you might get in the middle of night offering you a credit card- never mind if you already hold one.

Coming back to the telecom policy- frankly, I hope that some clear resolution comes in sight to the present impasse. As the government of the day persists in its neo liberalist agendas and is bent over backwards to accommodate the private interests over public good, expect more of these announcements or “rumored leaks”.

Let Indians suffer.

This post was submitted by Dr. Abhishek Puri on the Broadband Blog on Techwhack.