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As the first chairman of a regulatory authority, Justice S S Sodhi's time at the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has been far from easy. In fact, he has had to bear the brunt of government opposition whenever the regulator has wanted to take any step in the direction of independent regulation to check the incumbent monopoly operator -- the government's own Department of Telecommunications (DoT). He spoke to NAVIKA KUMAR in an exclusive interview. Excerpts:
The telecom tangle has become even more muddled today with the government being embarrassed by the President, the Election Commission and the courts. How would the TRAI have handled the problem of a migration had an opportunity been given to the authority?
Had the TRAI been involved in solving the problem of migrating the existing operators from the present licence fee arrangement to a revenue-sharing one, we would have followed a completely transparent and consultative process. We would have listed the issues relating to themigration and the options available. Then through an interactive process by inviting comments and holding discussions with all the concerned parties the government, the private operators and even consumer groups before arriving at any conclusion through a consensus.
However, the government, in its wisdom decided to keep us out of this process. In fact, the TRAI has been left completely in the dark in this regard, with no communication with the government. Whatever we know on the issue is through newspaper reports. If this is the role of the TRAI visualised by the government, so be it.
The Attorney General Soli Sorabjee has submitted in the Court that among other representations received from various political parties on the ``urgency'' of migrating to the new Telecom Policy 1999 (NTP 99), the TRAI had also urged for a similar urgent redressal of the problem. Your comments.
While the case is sub judice, I would not like to comment much on it. However, I do not recall any specific occasion onwhich the TRAI had expressed any specific need for urgency in this regard except in our reply to the consultation paper released by the group on telecom in early 1999.There has been very little communication between the government and the TRAI on any matter relating to the telecom sector. In fact, the only communication in this regard that we have received so far is the one after the Cabinet decided (on July 6) to allow existing licensees to migrate to a revenue-sharing regime.
We have now been asked to give our recommendations on the revenue-sharing arrangement. For this, we have been given no guidelines on what should be the basis for revenue sharing. At the moment, there are three obvious options that could be possible. First, whether the revenue share must have some component of revenues for the exchequer, the question of viability of projects notwithstanding.
Second, every licence should have an in-built element of rent, arising out of the fact the number of players in the market is restricted. Thethird option could be to keep the revenue share at a level to cover the cost of administration of the licence and to keep out the non-serious players.The TRAI does not have any preferences at the moment on any of these options, but would put these in its consultation paper.
The fears that have been often expressed about the TRAI being very receptive to the voice of the private operators lobby which drowns the government monopoly's (read Department of Telecommunications') concerns. How do you react to these insinuations?
There is a great need for public education with regard to the rationale behind liberalisation of the telecom sector. If the feeling is that government monopolies can best serve the interest of the nation, then that should be the stated policy of the government and it should forget about competition.
On the other hand, world experience shows that the interest of the consumer is best served through competition this can be seen anywhere in the world where service is efficient andtariffs are low. If this fact is established, then competition has to be nurtured through a level-playing field. We cannot have a player which is a government monopoly and also serves as the umpire in the game. The job of the TRAI is to make sure that these two conditions are available to players, Unfortunately, this has also been the area where TRAI has persistently been questioned by the government.
With private operators being allowed to move to revenue-sharing, there is an expectations from consumers that the TRAI would revise tariffs downwards, at least for cell phones. Your comments.
The TRAI tariff paper has a commitment to revisit tariffs within a year since its announcement in March, earlier this year. At that stage, we will take into account the changed circumstances like licence fee being replaced by revenue share. At that stage, the effect of revenue share on the cost element would have to be examined.
It would be difficult to commit any reductions in tariffs before that, even ifthe NTP is effective from August 1, as it would take us around four months to work out our consultation paper. After this, one does not know how much time the government would take to deliberate on our recommendations for revenue share. It is only after this that the tariff exercise would begin.More importantly, at the moment it is setting up benchmarks for quality of services by both the government and private operators. For this, we need to have an implementation procedure in place to bring in accountability by the operators. We are considering setting up the institution of the ombudsman for telecom subscribers, to keep an eye on the quality complaints. This idea has been borrowed from the Australian model. We are now working out the precise formulation of this proposal.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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