New Telecom Policy to focus on application: Manoj Sinha

The government is working on a New Telecom Policy for India and this time the focus is on application and not connectivity.

The Minister of Communications Manoj Sinha said that his ministry is working on a New Telecom Policy which will be application driven as compared to National Telecom Policy 2012 which was connectivity driven.

Speaking at a seminar on ICT: Engendering New Governance Structure, Manoj Sinha said, “The new policy has to be focused on end users and should look at newer opportunities for expanding the availability of telecom services.”

The advent of high speed data services and enhanced expectations of the users to get real time on-demand bandwidth to run near real time live applications enjoins us to prepare new policies added Sinha.

For the first time, the ministry has decided to involve a large pool of experts from outside the department to get more inputs from the citizens and stakeholders for the new policy.

The minister said that communications sector has assumed the position of an essential infrastructure for socio-economic development in an increasingly knowledge-intensive world.

He said that it is heartening to see the six-fold increase in data traffic in India rom 561 million GB in the first quarter to 2,988 million GB in the third quarter of 2016-17, which is a whopping 400% jump.

The Department of Telecom has announced the ‘Central Equipment Identity Register’ last week, which paves the way for setting up of International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) based device registration and authentication that will settle the cases of mobile phone theft to a great extent. The department is also actively considering the TRAI recommendations on addressing telecom consumer grievances and urged the officers to propose technology driven solution that records, monitors and provides end-to-end monitoring of every grievance.

Calling for a revisit of the current HR policies of the government, the minister said that there has been a recognition that specialized skills have to be drawn from both within the government system and also from outside wherever possible as the centre and the states are woefully short of such skilled resources.