Increase Trust Among Stakeholders

In the last 2 years, the trust between industry and government, industry and regulator, government and regulator, and between industry players has decreased significantly. The time has come to rectify this and do a fast recovery so that the industry can bounce back to normalcy. This will help everybody in the long run.

Telecom, the sunrise industry of the Indian economy, is going through a bad phase. Trust is at its lowest, thanks to the numerous court cases, but a genuine effort should be made by all stakeholders to come out from this confusion. All this will lead to a positive and cordial environment among all the stakeholders, helping industry to recover fast.

Trust is at its lowest also between the government and industry, and regulator and the industry. According to the industry, the government wants to kill it by taxing for each and everything, and if this is not enough, the government wants to heavily penalize the industry for any wrong doing. So, to remove the logjam, the government and the regulator need to take some positive steps which will help the industry move forward.

The role of the regulator is not only to do regulation but to see that the industry survives from a crisis and moves forward rather than continuously fall into one crisis after another. I believe a lot will improve if the regulator thinks about how to make the telecom industry more investment friendly and more consumer friendly rather than thinking about how to collect more money for the government.

If we look closely, the recent regulation—be it 2G spectrum pricing, bringing telecom tower players under the ambit of license fees, bringing VAS players under the ambit of license fees, and others—in all these cases, the perceived intention of the regulator was to earn more revenue for the government. Sometimes, this is okay but not always, as one cannot tax the service providers after a certain extent.

There is a difference between past regulation and regulation made in the last 2 years. Earlier, if there was any mistake in regulation, the regulator used to do course correction and move forward but in the last 2 years, the regulators have been committing mistakes after mistakes and the end result is that things are not moving forward. I believe, the new chairperson should think about all these things and focus on regulation to make it more consumer friendly and industry friendly. This will help the industry to move in a forward direction.

It seems even the government, ie, Department of Telecommunications’ entire focus is to earn hefty fees from the operators by imposing a minimum penalty of 50 crore. Even the formation of term cell in the government is to collect more revenue for the government. The government should be more proactive and make rules which are transparent so that its interpretation does not differ from person to person or company to company.

Even the industry players need to come together and leave their fights for the common cause of making telecom once again the sunrise sector of the Indian economy. This would not be easy for the players as they have been fighting for the voice revenue share in the past but things are going to change once the focus shifts from voice to data where one needs a different mindset.

To make India a world power in data infrastructure (3G or 4G), operators need to do a lot of collaboration as singlehandedly they are not in a position to create that mammoth infrastructure. Not only this, they also do not have enough cash to fund these projects. So, the only option is to increase trust between operators, government, and regulators and this will definitely help the industry to move out of the present crisis.