R.S. Sharma, chairman, TRAI
During the past one year, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued consultation papers and initiated deliberations on various issues including net neutrality, cloud and machine-to-machine communications. Of the 22 new consultation papers issued last year, more than half have resulted in recommendations. TRAI is hopeful that these recommendations will help clear up the ambiguities in the sector and lend regulatory support to the evolving information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem. At the India Internet Conference 2017 organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and IT, R.S. Sharma, chairman, TRAI, talked about the regulator’s key priorities and challenges. Excerpts…
The overarching principles of TRAI, as far as regulating the telecom and broadcasting sectors is concerned, are consumer protection, transparency, non-discrimination, quality of service and overall growth of the industry, as well as ensuring a level playing field and fair competition. Since opinions differ in terms of defining what is “fair” or “good” or “timely” for the sector, it is important that every regulation is prepared post consulting the stakeholders. The process may take six or seven months, but TRAI believes in putting in a lot of thought before issuing a consultation paper. We study international best practices, and try to give both arguments and counter arguments on any issue.
As a regulator, there are typically two types of issues before us – those that are important and those that are urgent. Often, it is the latter that take priority and the former are placed on the backburner. Thus, to understand the issues that are important to the industry, we consulted with all the industry stakeholders, primarily broadcasters and telecom operators, in the beginning of 2017. This exercise helped us in understanding their expectations from the regulator. During deliberations, we mutually agreed on six or seven issues that require regulatory attention and guidance. TRAI is systematically working on these to bring out relevant consultation papers.
Some of our regulations are as old as the regulator itself; for instance, telecom tariff orders (TTOs). Although these have been amended from time to time (TTOs have been amended more than 69 times), these may require a complete overhaul, replacement or suspension depending on their relevance in the current telecom scenario. We have decided to take some of these obsolete regulations/laws off our books and replace them with ones that are more valid.
Another issue that has been taken up by the regulator is how to facilitate ease-of-doing business in the sector. To this end, we conducted a specific study to understand the perspective of our stakeholders; the processes that they perceive to be redundant, cumbersome or harassing, and whether they can be done away with without compromising the quality of decision-making.
Meanwhile, broadband proliferation continues to be a key priority for TRAI. Digital India is a comprehensive programme, which sets out priorities that will transform India into a digitally empowered society and a knowledge economy. It has three layers – infrastructure, software and services, and citizen empowerment. The infrastructure layer is the most fundamental because everything else will ride on it. The programme has nine quantifiable or actionable pillars. The first pillar among them is broadband as a utility to citizens. I believe that this is the most important pillar as most of the other pillars rest on this one. India currently ranks 132 in broadband penetration amongst a community of 195 nations. This is not an encouraging statistic for a country that houses one-sixth of the world’s population. Further, India constitutes a large fraction of the offline population across the world. There are 4 billion people in the world who are unconnected to the internet today. Of these, 1 billion are in India. Given this worrisome situation, broadband has been on the regulator’s priority list even before I took charge as chairman. In April 2015, TRAI had issued a comprehensive set of recommendations for the government, as to what should be done to enhance broadband penetration in the country.
Since then, we have worked on various areas concerning it. We have already made three to four specific recommendations to the government in the broadband space. The first recommendation concerns the implementation of BharatNet in public-private partnership mode. This is extremely important as BharatNet seeks to connect every gram panchayat through an optical fibre cable point of presence (PoP). There are 250,000 panchayats for 600,000 villages. So, essentially, a cluster of every two or three villages will have a PoP, which can be a gigabit PoP or a terabit PoP. From these points, service delivery can be achieved through Wi-Fi or similar solutions. This is a very ambitious programme and we plan to spend about $20 billion on its implementation.
Our recommendation has been that BharatNet should not be implemented as a government programme, wherein the government constructs, maintains and markets the network. These project goals will be difficult to achieve as the number of stakeholders runs in thousands, if not in hundred thousand. We believe that a project like BharatNet succeeds when there is an alignment of interests of all the stakeholders across the value chain, and they have similar interests in the acceleration of the project. Aadhaar is a key example of that.
We have recommended a build-own-operate-transfer model, under which the entrepreneur who builds the infrastructure is the one who owns it and operates it and finally, either transfers it to the government or continues to operate it. This can take around 25 years, because that is ideally the life of an optical fibre cable network. Further, we have said that wherever construction has already taken place, the operations, maintenance and marketing must be done in a transparent manner. The government is currently evaluating these recommendations and, if considered, can help in better implementation of the project.
We are also sending recommendations to the government regarding the digital cable TV ecosystem, which has come up in a very big way in the country. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and TRAI have together ensured that we have a completely digitised cable TV framework, which will serve as digital infrastructure to some extent. Through minor upgradation of this infrastructure, we will be able to provide broadband services to 100 million homes via the digital cable TV medium. This is a very low-hanging fruit and the government is considering this aspect as 100 million homes translates into 500 million people being connected via wired infrastructure. Highly reliable and robust bandwidth can be delivered along with that infrastructure.
We have also put across suggestions for the satellite industry as we currently have certain policy restrictions on the use of satellite data. We cannot lay fibre across 10-15 per cent of the land and, therefore, need satellite solutions there.
“TRAI’s overarching principles are consumer protection, transparency, non-discrimination, quality of service and overall growth of the industry.”
The most recent recommendation that we have sent to the government, about a few weeks back, relates to minor tweaking of the licensing conditions, to enable a network or a grid of Wi-Fi hotspots across the country. There are 450 million Wi-Fi hotspots across the world. As against this, there are only 31,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in India. We need at least another 800,000 hotspots. Also, we need Wi-Fi hotspots that can provide affordable but ubiquitous connectivity to the rural population. We have 250,000 kiosks or common service centres (CSCs) and if Wi-Fi hotspots can be installed across all these CSCs, a major part of the population will be covered.
These are three or four recommendations that we have submitted to the government and have a very big role to play in Digital India’s success. The country has made significant progress in creating digital identity infrastructure and in the digital payments space. The unified payments interface is one of the most robust platforms we have created. The e-sign facility and digital locker are other key achievements. The world is amazed that such sophisticated information technology infrastructure has been created by our country. All these systems will be fuelled by adequate connectivity, which we need to have in place for Digital India to succeed.
