In a bid to enhance the ease of doing business as well as reduce time taken in network rollout, the department of telecommunications (DoT) is planning to amend the Sea Customs Act so that telecom operators do not need a separate licence for importing telecom equipment. At present, under the Sea Customs Act, 1878, every entity, including a telecom operator with a licence to provide mobile services, needs to get an import licence from the DoT to import any wireless equipment. A senior government official said this provision made sense in the pre-liberalisation era when the government was the sole provider of telecom services and so for import of such equipment by a private party an import licence was required. “But today almost 90-95% of telecom services are provided by private players. Also under the licence condition, these operators are allowed to own, establish and operate network, including telecom equipment. So operators to apply for a separate licence for telecom equipment is redundant and undesirable. Besides, it delays the import of equipment, which in turn delays roll out of network and also has financial implications for companies,” he explained. Planning to do away with such archaic laws, the telecom ministry is mulling on amending the regulations in consultation with the Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) wing as well as the stakeholders. This issue is also being deliberated by the working groups formed for drafting the new National Telecom Policy (NTP), 2018, a source said.
Similar recommendations have also been made by the regulator Trai and the government-appointed inter ministerial group (IMG) that was created to suggest measures to help the cash-strapped sector. “Import licences from WPC for radio frequency (RF) equipment bought from outside India acts as a bottleneck for us as it generally takes around two months. The equipment is held up for custom clearances till these licences are cleared and hence causes significant delays in deployment of various network elements and thus hampering the network expansion,” a top executive from leading telecom operator said. During April-December 2016, DoT issued 2,050 such licences and another 2,000 in January-March 2017. According to DoT officials, the total imports related to the telecom sector are more than `1 lakh crore annually.
