This is the concluding part of the article titled Critical issues in implementation of telecommunication reformsThe operator-licensor DoT imposed a further obnoxious condition as to where the P-Telcos should hand over an inter-state call originating from the P-Telco's subscriber to the DoT. The P-Telco must hand over the call to the DoT at the headquarters town of the district in which the call originated.
How iniquitous and unnecessary this is can be seen from the following:Suppose a P-Telco subscriber in Visakhapatnam has to call a number in Chennai. The P-Telco must hand over that call to the DoT in Visakhapatnam itself from where the DoT would carry it over its network to deliver to Chennai.
The P-Telco will have to pay to the DoT an amount, which depends on the distance between Visakhapatnam to Chennai. But the P-Telco has got its own long distance network from Visakhapatnam up to Gudur. If it carries the Visakhapatnam-Chennai call on its network, up to Gudur and hands it over to DoT inGudur, then it will have to pay to the DoT an amount, which depends on the distance between Gudur and Chennai instead of Visakhapatnam and Chennai. In other words, the DoT is compelling its rival P-Telco to pay unnecessary amounts to the DoT and also not to use its own network. There is no guarantee of the quality of service for carriage between Visakhapatnam and Chennai by the DoT.
There are several such impositions by the operator-licensor DoT on the P-Telcos. Only after the P-Telcos signed agreements incorporating all these obligations was a licence given.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) was created after DoT's attempts to create a toothless and truthless unit within itself to regulate P-Telcos. It never occurred to the DoT how a subordinate unit created by it, paid by it, working under it, can regulate over the disputes between the creator DoT and the P-Telcos. Luckily, such attempts were defeated in the Rajya Sabha in 1995.
It is in the next Parliament that a statutory regulator,the Trai was created, ie, when the operator-licensor DoT first completed the licensing process on terms and conditions that guarantee its predominance and supremacy over its rival licensed P-Telcos and then only the statutory Trai came. Now the P-Telcos are appealing to the Trai against the iniquitous conditions in the license. The operator-licensor DoT is arguing that the Trai has no jurisdiction over the disputes between the licensor (ie, operator DoT) and its rivals, the P-Telcos (the New Telecom Policy-99 concedes the right to Trai to adjudicate all such disputes).
From all the above, it would be seen that:
The NTP-94 by itself, was a noble and grand policy statement; The implementation of the Policy was entrusted to the DoT itself, which stands to lose its monopoly. The DoT has therefore introduced such serious distortions, which not only disable and destroy P-Telcos but also go against the interests of the consumers. The fundamental mistake was not to have corporatised theoperations of the DoT and thus separated the policy and licensing from operations. Even today, there is no guarantee when DoT's operations would be corporatised. As long as they are not corporatised and they are invested with government authority, then the inequities like one set of subscribers having to incur license fee costs and others not having to incur such costs, would continue. The anti-customer nature of implementation is evident from two more glaring deprivations:
1. The cost of the license fees reflected into rentals and call charges and which have been hiked with effect from May 1, 1999.2. The customer does not have a choice of the carrier of his intra-state long distance calls although there are four entities who could carry his calls, namely, the DoT, the basic telephone company and two cellular telephone companies. If the customer were free, he can take local service from the DoT or the P-Telco and offer his intra-state long distance call to one of the four firms,which would give him the best service at the least price.3. The DoT has captive companies, the MTNL and VSNL. They operate under licence from DoT. MTNL pays a licence fee of a fixed amount of about Rs 900 per line per year and VSNL also pays a fixed license fee for every minute of global traffic. But the license fees to be paid by P-Telcos have no relation to whether P-Telco has got a network or not; whether it has got subscribers or not; whether it gets revenues or not. It must simply pay.The injustice is on three counts:
The license fee is to be paid in advance while MTNL and VSNL pay at the year-end. The P-Telcos are diverting their resource of investible funds from creating the network to pay license fees. Therefore, they are unable to attract equity investments nor are they viewed favourably by bankers for loans.The national telecom policy has been distorted in implementation to such an extent that NTP-94's aims are totally destroyed. In contrast, the Internet service policyof the BJP-led government which requires no licence fees, places no limit on the number of licences either for an area or for a company.
It enables Internet service providers (ISPs) to build their own customer-access networks, inter-city data transmission systems and international gate-ways and also allows the railways, the Power Grid Corporation, Oil and Natural Gas companies etc to build country-wide data infrastructure for lease to ISPs. To salvage the diseased NTP-94, the Prime Minister wanted the Task Force on Information Technology to write a new telecom policy.
The DoT successfully vetoed the Prime Minister's announcement by maneuvering to get a separate Group on Telecoms (GoT) constituted with itself as the king-pin. The GoT has come out with a new policy (NTP-99) which is come advance over the NTP-94 as implemented but which is far, far short of what this country needs and deserves. It leaves the problem of P-Telcos licenced under NTP-94 unresolved - the greatest dereliction of the reason whichtriggered NTP-99.
Even NTP-99 will be successfully sabotaged by DoT unless licencing is forthwith separated from it as long as its operations are not corporatised, unless DoT officers in the Trai are sent back to the DoT and unless we have a minister who does not work as though he is the chief operating officer of the operator-DoT. It is a tragedy that the country is having the 42nd minister for communications since Independence and the third within the last year - conditions most appropriate for capture of the temporary minister by the permanent techno-bureaucracy. Even as the rest of the world forges ahead, we will be limping in connecting to the grand global information infrastructure that wise countries are building.
The author is information technology adviser to the government of Andhra Pradesh
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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