TRAI vice-chairman BK Zutshi, while confirming this to The Financial Express, said this had become very important in light of the recent events.In a double blow to TRAI, the Delhi high court had on Tuesday observed that it was not empowered to give directions to the Union government on issuing licences to basic telecom operators.

In another case, the court had stayed operation of TRAI's show-cause notice to the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam against its limited mobility cellualar service launched earlier this month.

"If the government is keen to strengthen TRAI, it will have to ensure that our role as a dispute settlement and recommendatory authority between the licensor and the licencee is restored," he said.

According to legal opinion, TRAI's role as an `arbitrator' is not in conformity with the TRAI Act. The regulator had last communicated this to the government as part of its response to the new telecom policy over six months back.

"Since then, we are yet to hear from the government as to what it wishes our role to be. As of now, we are nothing more than a tariff-setting authority. Surely, that was not the idea of having a regulator," Zutshi lamented. "It is not an ideal situation where we have each and every licensing matter sorted out in the courts," he added. Saying it was not a legal, but a policy issue, Zutshi pointed out that as a result of "recent events", TRAI's role had been severely curtailed and it had been ``completely emasculated'' which was not in the consumer interest. Changes in the Act was the only way out to 0alvage the position and it will have to be taken up by the new government at the earliest, he said.

Also rebutting MTNL managing director S Rajagopalan's charge that TRAI had breached confidentiality by making public the crucial confidential information about its CDMA-based mobile service, Zutshi said, "MTNL had never indicated that it did not want the tariff-related information to be published in the consultations paper. "After all, they are not the only one whose information we have published. We have been publishing cost data provided to us by the Department of Telecom and the operators in the past also," he pointed out. Secondly, since there isn't other player in the CDMA-based mobile telephony, it did not make any sense to not publish MTNL's information as its identity was a foregone conclusion. Stating that consumers had a right to know the tariff information of all the companies, Zutshi accused MTNL of "adopting such tactics to divert attention from the real issues".