Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3. Even after liberalization of 90s, the policy makers lacked vision and clarity on
the adoption of right policy in the telecom sector. This is very well
demonstrated by the launch of successive New Telecom Policies by every now
and then whenever there is a change of government at the center.
4. Depriving autonomy to state PSUs and excessive interference from
government because of political considerations, thereby making them only
loss making and not allowing them to take right business decisions for
competing with the private sector, like the case of PSUs BSNL and Air India.
Proposed Solutions
1. Policy makers should have through understanding/update of the latest trends
in the technology available worldwide, as this forms a key ingredient in the
decision making process which will help in the making of high quality
decisions. Generally in the government the policy makers are the Ministers
(politicians) assisted by the civil servants, who are considered as the
generalists rather than specialists. However the generalists need not be the
specialists of every technical field, but they should improve their competence
and analytical skills in assessing the impact of the policy proposals on the
sector and if necessary the requisite technical expertise can be obtained from
a team of separate expert consultants.
2. A typical example where our policy planners failed miserably is in the
identification of the right technology for adoption in the case of mobile
services, like GSM and CDMA, which lead to the violation of policy guidelines
by some operators due to technology limitations and again changes of policy
guidelines to suit these operators etc. All this could have been avoided had a
proper study, analysis and thorough discussion been there on the choice of
right technology, in the best interests of the country, before making the key
policy decisions and assessing its impact on all stakeholders.
3. Now almost similar type of policy issues/conflicts are arising again in the roll
out of 3rd generation mobile technology services by different operators. Also
another upcoming technology is Wimax for providing broadband internet
services through wireless medium. The government has already auctioned
the spectrum to all prospective operators, but lacked a clear cut vision/clarity
on the technology front to be deployed by the operators in the roll out of the
services. It is necessary in the interest of the nation for the planner to come
out with right proposals, thoroughly debate and evaluate the pros and cons
of each and every choice of the technology and takes all the stakeholders
into confidence before taking the just and right final decision.