PTC India Foundation has awarded Pramod Mahajan, Minister for IT and Communication as the "Telecom man of the Year" for his role in accelerating the growth of the sector. The Minister was awarded the honor during a seminar organized by the Foundation to discuss the "Competitive Environment in Telecommunication".

Accepting the award, the Minister suggested four areas that the Foundation should deliberate upon to increase the competitiveness of the sector. First was the need to devise a framework to regulate the fast changing telecom technology. Second, was the need to introspect government's role as a telecom player in the country? It is a reality that the government has been a player of long standing in the sector and has done a considerable amount of work to bring telecommunication to the masses. Telecom being non-core the government will withdraw from the sector. But the process has to be gradual and smooth. So long the government holds interest in telecom operations, it is important to perceive that the government is equally a competitive player. It would be wrong to assume that the government is the big brother and shall hinder the process of privatization. At the same time, it is also wrong to assume that the government player would make concessions to private players just because it is the government. Therefore, in a competitive environment it is wrong to accuse the government player of predatory pricing whenever there is a tariff reduction.

Third, it is important to address the issue of social obligation. While it is true that market economy dictates that setting up operations in the rural areas are not viable, it is equally true that private operators have gone back on their license commitments. Rural telephony should be looked upon as a social obligation. Fourth is the need to expedite justice and dispute in the sector. Since litigation is long and tedious in the general judiciary route, special telecom courts TDSAT, TRAI have been set up. But strangely, players are never happy with the decision of the lower courts and invariably land up in the Supreme Court defeating the very purpose of these special courts.

The Panel which deliberated on issues regarding the competitiveness of the sector included PS Saran, Former Secretary of DTS; SD Saxena, Director, Finance, BSNL; Prithipal Singh, CMD BSNL; KH Khan, CGM, MTNL; Umang Das, Managing Director Corporate Affairs Spice Telecom and Narendra Gupta, VP, Regulatory Affairs from Bharti Televentures.

One of the major issues that came out of the discussion was the urgent need to stop undercutting tariffs for short-term customer acquisition. It does not help the cause of the sector that most telcos at running losses since capex is very high with huge gestation periods. Therefore, it was important that operators co-operate as an industry and decide on a minimum base of tariff, which is logical. With frequent undercutting of tariffs, the panel warned that things have come to such a pass that operators far from making profits are now making looses and the fear is that there could be more bloodbath in the industry like in the case of the ISP and paging sector

CNS