Column : Time to refarm telecom governance

There is a fond belief that by throwing ever more resources into the bottomless pit of telecom governance, something of value may eventually be extracted. The ongoing spectacle around spectrum refarming is just the latest example. Trai stirred the pot to cook a mish-mash, and the telecom commission made a bigger hash, if such a feat was at all possible. The ball then gets booted to the eGoM?s court, which in turn scooped it to the Union Cabinet. If you choose to get your root canal procedure performed by the health minister instead of a dental surgeon, the outcome may be final, but may be less than satisfying. We can only hope the superior political instincts of the members of the Cabinet will help them sense that the country is playing with fire, even if the issue by itself is too technical, and avert a mis-step for the country. But this episode only underscores what has been obvious for over a decade, that it is not spectrum, but our telecom governance framework that needs refarming.

This piece is not about spectrum refarming. But make no mistake, such a proposal of uprooting gigantic telecom networks will find no precedent anywhere in the world. It would eclipse even the experiments of Muhammad bin Tughluq 700 years ago. It is intellectually and morally bankrupt. A license is defined by its frequency band. The assigned frequency is integral to the license, just as a toffee is integral to its wrapper. If you swallow the toffee and return the wrapper, whom are you fooling? Your own country-folk? There is the brahma-astra clause that the government has the right to change any license term at any time. Rights exist to do right, not to do wrong! If media reports are to be believed, even the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission has said in another context?and it needed to be said?that even if the license terms are indeed open to such a wide interpretation, those terms must not be invoked, and going forward such license terms should be rewritten to eliminate the scope of misplaced interventions. The same gentleman had earlier aptly likened the imaginative and amusing conceptions of a level playing field advanced to justify similar proposals to a Procrustean Bed. Procrustes, if you check Wikipedia, was a bandit in ancient Greece who waylaid passers-by and forced them upon a bed and either stretched them or chopped them to exactly the length of the bed, until they died screaming. Ever since, the Procrustean Bed is a byword for mindless arbitrariness and destruction.

Why has our telecom policymaking plumbed such depths? It has not happened one fine day; it has been a steady one-way decline starting from the 1990s. We liberalised the telecom sector, but could not liberalise the mind-set. Telecom regulation is an advanced and evolved body of knowledge, and we are hopelessly out of our depth. There is no equivalent of our department of telecommunications, or of the telecom ministry, in countries where telecom has been liberalised. But the functionaries in the 1990s were loathe to surrender their powers, and the government of that day did not crack the whip. So, the DoT survived, like an item past its sell-by date, atrophying year after year in capabilities. This outcome is not the failing of the individuals concerned, but the impossible situation they have been placed in. There are umpteen mine-fields laid by the aberrations of their masters of yesteryears, and all these become precedents to be accommodated. Take one look at an officer confronted with any new issue. Poor fellow, it is writ large on his face he is struggling not with the issue at hand, but with how to navigate without exposing or exploding some minefield of yesteryear. Meanwhile, this same department wields unimaginable powers, without accountability. Even a bench of the Supreme Court will consider and reconsider, before inflicting a cost of R5 crore upon any commercial organisation, and that too only if it is severely inclined.

Not so for the DoT! The DoT shoots penalties at R50 crore per circle; mind you, there are 22 circles. It is almost a reflex action.

A rampant DoT is also the major reason why Trai has not been allowed to develop into an expert body that commands respect and provides thought-leadership like its counterparts in other countries. A top-notch regulator determining all telecom policies other than national security, and reporting to a standing committee of Parliament, is the way to go and the way the world has gone. Not only will the Trai Act need re-enactment, but Trai will also need to change to become unrecognisable from what it is today. There are techniques of transition management, which the government would know well, provided it has the will to take on this change.

Crony capitalism is popularly cited as the cause of the telecom sector?s policy woes. That may be so, but crony capitalism would have been blunted if we had erected capable governance institutions. Sound policies flow from sound institutions. The government should facilitate, not micro-manage. There is no better time to attack the problem at its roots.

The author is an industry expert. The views expressed are personal