Calling the shots
The telecom regulator insists his organisation’s decision to slash interconnection charges was driven by his understanding of the advances in 4G technology
The chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), Ram Sewak Sharma, is willing to be unconventional. It has often helped him leap over the many typical hurdles that stymie decision-making, he says.
That world view earns him fierce opposition, too. As it did on Tuesday evening when he announced that interconnection user charges (IUC) would be cut by more than half.
The steep 57 per cent cut in the charges service providers pay each other for calls terminating on their respective networks has been excellent news for Reliance Jio’s year- old service only; for established incumbents such as Vodafone-Idea and Airtel, the decision crimps a tidy source of revenue.
A decision to keep the rates unchanged would have impacted the companies in the reverse way. Given the polarised controversy surrounding the IUC issue over the past year, Sharma, 62, could easily have resorted to the seasoned bureaucrat’s modus operandi and kept the decision pending as a bequest for his successor — he completes his term in July next year.
The other compelling reason to have done so was to avoid the charge of favouring one industrial house over another. This is a hazard to which all bureaucrats dealing with economic ministries or industry and commerce are vulnerable, especially among their peers, and has long provided a handy excuse for officers to avoid taking decisions on key economic issues that have the potential to create winners and losers.
But Sharma was unlikely to let this line of reasoning stop him from making his decision. Once he was convinced that IUC was on borrowed time, a relic from the 2G era, which sits uncomfortably with 4G technology, it was a matter of when to make the decision.
A gradual “glide path” was the recommended route, but Sharma opted for a hard landing. “It is a question of efficient use of the spectrum available. Unlike a mineral, a spectrum not used now cannot be hoarded for future,” he explained. The way to ensure the spectrum is used to its full capacity is when the regulator promotes technologies with lower costs, so that consumers benefit from lower tariffs. “So, Trai is expected to be forward-looking and base its regulations on the most efficient technology,” he added.
The IUC controversy marks just one of a series of challenges that Sharma has faced in his two years in charge. The vexed question of net neutrality was one of them, which took on Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook. And the launch of Reliance Jio, with its serial free offers, marked another. Asked about the latter, Sharma said he was helpless because the Trai regulations were silent on this contingency, “never mind the fact that it did offend my sense of what’s proper”?
Technology has long been Sharma’s hobby horse. He was picked by Nandan Nilekani as the director general for the Aadhaar project, a rare officer who was easy driving a technology project. Sharma had worked as secretary in Jharkhand’s IT department intermittently and has hilarious tales about that stint. By his own estimation, his forte is executing projects. When Nilekani was looking for an officer who would be, effectively, CEO of the project, a Karnataka-based IAS officer suggested Sharma’s name. It worked like magic. “When we met, Nandan told me I had to execute the project; working the political clearances was his domain.”
Sharma had joined undivided Bihar cadre of the Indian Administrative Service in 1978 but opted for Jharkhand when the state was created in 2000. Once, as deputy commissioner of Dhanbad chasing the coal mafia he was faced with the prospect of the prime minister, visiting the house of one of the more powerful dons. Sharma declined to accompany the PM for that leg of the visit. “I had several warrants against the don. How was I to pay him, a social visit?”
Crime was one of the reasons that the mathematics graduate from IIT, Kanpur, became a technology buff. As district magistrate in Begusarai, Bihar, he wrote a code on a DCM 10-D computer to track police weapons that routinely surfaced in the hands of criminal gangs after they were reported lost. In the topsy-turvy world that is Bihar’s criminal-police nexus, this program created havoc. Crime dipped. Sharma was transferred.
In Jharkhand, too, he says he went through nine transfers during his seven-year stint, the standard fate of any reasonably conscientious bureaucrat. When he returned as chief secretary in the state in 2013 after his stint at Unique Identification Authority of India, Aadhaar’s governing organisation, he introduced the bio-metric attendance system for all state government employees. It was almost expected that staff tried to tamper with or steal machines in some places (unsuccessfully, it turned out). Nevertheless, that experience helped him develop a more robust country-wide attendance system for central government employees when he returned as secretary in the department of electronics and information technology.
Beyond Trai his current passion is his farm, just a three-hour drive from Delhi. “I manage to visit it at least once every month,” he says. Organic farming is his pet project. But sitting there, Sharma says he is even more convinced that beyond the corporate battles, it is in providing broadband access to villages that India needs to ramp up capacity furiously.
Earlier this year, he had annoyed some of his colleagues in the telecom department when he pointed out to them that against a global average penetration of broadband at 46 per cent, India scored only 7 per cent. It is far less than even modest Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam or the Philippines.