Rural telephony on Raja's core agenda

New Delhi, May 16: Newly appointed Communications and IT Minister A Raja today said his top priority area will be to strenghten rural telephony and extend related facilities to the lowest ebb of the social sector.

''Telecom sector is on a move and has to be reached to the lowest strata of people,'' Mr Raja told reporters after taking charge of the ministry.

Elaborating on his predecessor Dayanidhi Maran's announcement regarding scrapping of roaming charges, Mr Raja said he will look into the matter with his officers.

He also said he will work towards attracting more investments in the telecom sector by other countries.

''All the efforts and endeavours made by Mr Maran, whether it is roaming charges, 3G mobile services, spectrum allocation, and others will continue,'' the minister said, adding all the hurdles confronting the issue will be discussed with the officers later.

''My predecessor had announced many schemes, some of them were completed and few are in pipeline. I will give final shape to it after discussions with officials,'' Mr Raja added. Mr Maran was successful in bringing the first chip manufacturing facility into the country when AMD signed a technological pact with SemIndia, an NRI-backed consortium for a three-billion-dollar project in Hyderabad.

During his tenure, world's largest mobile phone maker Nokia finally agreed to set up a manufacturing unit in India, besides others like Ericsson and Motorola.

Mr Maran's brush with controversies started when he stepped into the domain of telecom regulator TRAI on the crucial issue of Access Deficit Charge (ADC), a fee paid by private operators to BSNL for its rural and remote area networks despite the TRAI Act making it clear that regulating tariffs and ADC was TRAI's domain.

It was felt that he took the ill-fated step, from which he subsequently backtracked, to settle scores with former TRAI Chairman Pradip Baijal. It was not just that, Mr Maran also got most of the TRAI proposal given under Baijal's regime reworked under a new Chairman again like 3G recommendations.

The other step which might not have made any economic sense to telecom PSUs like BSNL and MTNL was the much-touted OneIndia scheme where one can call any part of the country at Re one a minute. Analysts exactly did not approve this as tariffs rates in India were already the lowest in the world.

The telecom industry does acknowledge that hiking FDI in telecom to 74 per cent might not have been his decision but getting it done in a coalition government was one of his biggest achievements.

The addition of over six million mobile telephony subscribers a month was seen as a reflection of Mr Maran's policy and it was during his time, India joined the elite club of 100 million mobile subscribers. Maran had set a target of 500 million telephone connections by 2010.

To bring competition into the National and International Long Distance telephony, outgoing minister Dayanidhi Maran also reduced the license fee substantially as well as revenue share.

UNI

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