FICCI organised an interactive session on the National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2011, wherein various industry stakeholders put forward their views and comments to R. Chandrashekhar, secretary, Department of Telecommunications.

The FICCI-PricewaterhouseCoopers India (PwC) report titled Fostering Economic Growth through next generation reforms in Enterprise Services & Data Sector: Inputs for NTP 2011 and National  Policy on IT 2011 was released at the event.

The report has made wide-ranging recommendations for creating an open, transparent and conducive environment for the NTP 2011.

The report states that an important driver of the Indian telecom sector is a liberalised and transparent regulatory approach. Opening up the telecom sector has led to the phenomenal growth through voice and basic telephony over the last decade. The same approach should be adopted for data services.

Unlike the second generation reforms, the next generation reforms would be fuelled by the enterprise telecom segment.

In this context, the upcoming NTP 2011 is expected to provide an environment necessary for the paradigm shift in reforms for the enterprise sector.

Unveiling the report, Virat Bhatia, chairman, the Communications & Digital Economy Committee, FICCI said, ?The NTP 2011 provides a viable platform to address the needs of enterprise telecom services users on the one hand and the regulatory challenges faced by service providers on the other.?

A few key recommendations of the FICCI-PwC report are:

  • A single uniform license fee of 6 per cent adjusted gross revenue (AGR) or less should be adopted for all services under the unified license across the country to provide telecom services. Internet services may be kept out of the license fee regime, while taxing only the VOIP services provided by the internet service providers (ISPs).
  • Suitable provisions should be made to allow both active and passive infrastructure sharing between various telecom operators and ISPs.
  • Efforts should be made to avoid taxing domestic and international operators twice by allowing them pass-through on the inputs.
  • Telecommunications should be given the status of essential services. The Indian Telegraph Act 1885 should be updated.
  • Encryption levels should be enhanced to globally acceptable levels. Asymmetric key length of up to 2048 bits and symmetric key length of up to 256 bits should be allowed.
  • Security and monitoring conditions should be reviewed suitably for enterprise data and the Indian Telegraph Act (1885) should be updated suitably.
  • Single-window clearance should be mandated for cable landing stations instead of the current highly complex clearance procedures.
  • Enterprise users should be allowed to interconnect for captive requirements and within the same group company.
  • Regulations pertaining to other service providers (OSP) should be minimised. Interconnectivity and infrastructure-sharing, both active and passive, should be allowed among different OSPs. Single-OSP registration should be permitted for the entire organisation while allowing agent?s connectivity to company?s IT systems to facilitate work from anywhere within India. This can help in increasing the productivity of the ITeS/BPO sector.
  • Maintaining the affordability of enterprise services is essential to keep the IT, BPO and manufacturing sectors competitive. All avenues and elements that go into making enterprise services affordable should be explored. Specifically, steps may also be taken to lower the cost of production of bandwidth including considering incentives for bandwidth providers as well as reviewing the current levies and other parameters that impact their cost structure.