Kapil Sibal, Minister of Telecommunications and IT, has unveiled the draft National Telecom Policy 2011.
The draft policy states that revenue generation will play a secondary role and the main objective is to increase rural teledensity to 100 per cent by 2020.
Sibal said that special focus will be on rural and remote areas and the new policy would have a framework to make more spectrum available.
The draft plan also proposes to eliminate roaming charges, introduce a stronger customer grievance redressal mechanism, recognise telecom as an infrastructure sector, thereby giving it tax concessions, and extending preferential status to Made in India hardware products.
The policy will focus on the convergence of TV, the internet and internet services. Broadband download speed will be revised to 512 kbps, up from 216 kbps currently. Sibal said that the government will audit the use of spectrum. He added that the policy aims to make India a hub for telecom equipment manufacturing and will have provisions to create a corpus for R&D, IPR and entrepreneurship.
