Dhal gaya din, she SMSs, reminiscent of Leena Chandravarkar singing as she serves to Jeetendra in Humjoli. Tak, our modern day Jumping Jack SMSs back, imitating the sound a shuttlecock makes when it connects with a badminton racquet. ‘Ho gayee shaam ... tak ... Jaane do ... tak ... Jaana hai ... tak ...’ Even though, under its TimePass scheme, Vodafone offers SMS facilities at 10 paise a pop, playing out the whole song is likely to be a bit expensive.
So what’s this trip down memory lane got to do with the subject of this column, namely the just-initiated process to select a new telecom regulator, now that Trai Chairman Nripendra Misra is about to retire? A lot actually, but we’ll come to that in a bit.
The primary job of the new regulator, whenever s/he gets selected, is to do everything to increase competition in the market place, to get a better deal for subscribers. Here’s where dhal gaya din comes in. The world over, telecom companies are moving on to what are called Next Generation Networks (NGN) which are, in a nutshell, based on internet protocol technology.
In other words, you pay for passing/consuming data through a communications pipe (a flat rate per month, whether you use the phone or not, for browsing, for talking, for viewing television ... ), you don’t pay for each SMS of a particular length (160 characters) or for every 10 seconds you’re on the phone. NGN makes SMS@10p redundant, but it also kills the current business plans of most incumbents (and will completely annihilate the newcomers whose bargain-basement prices of Rs 1,651 crore will also seem overpriced!). So will the new regulator ensure the licences are re-written [the Trai has the power has the power to do this under Section 11(1)( a)(ii)] to allow this?
More important, will the government accept this recommendation? It has, for instance, sat on the Trai’s recommendation on allowing internet telephony which will drive down long distance rates to a small fraction of what they are today.
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This, of course, is where the IAS-types will say they’re more suited to get nominated to regulatory jobs (of the names doing the rounds, barring one, all are IAS officials including Telecom Secretary S Behura). After all, they’re more used to dealing with government and know how to get things going.
They may have a point here, but consider the government’s ad for the job — notice, really, since the four-page note has appeared on a government website and I haven’t seen any ads in popular newspapers/magazines on the matter. You’d think the government would advertise that the main job is to foster competition, to embrace new technology.
No, the notice just says, ‘The Chairperson heads TRAI. He [no she!] has powers of general superintendence and direction in the conduct of the affairs of the Authority and in addition to presiding over the meetings of the Authority, exercises and discharges such powers and functions of the Authority as may be prescribed’. In other words, we’ll tell you what you can do! Not surprisingly, neither this, nor any other regulatory job in the country, attracts top-notch talent from the private sector.
Given that salaries of regulators have been so handsomely raised now, the chances of former bureaucrats wanting to corner the job are just that much higher. This is not meant to be personal, but how can former secretaries who’ve only done the government’s bidding (on handing out telecom licences at bargain-basement rates or on not allowing ‘open access’ in the case of the power sector, for instance) even be expected to understand their jobs are now quite different? With few exceptions, how many regulators have done really path-breaking things to increase competition — and of these few like Justice Sodhi in Trai and SL Rao in the CERC, how many were bureaucrats?
Even if you assume the next Trai head does want to do all this, keep in mind that Members in these regulatory commissions are generally either former bureaucrats or PSU executives who continue to retain their allegiance to their former employers. Move lower down, at the staff level, and consider how many regulatory commissions are staffed with top-notch economists, lawyers, chartered accountants and other professionals.
But, as COAI Director General TV Ramachandran will call up to ask once he reads this piece, what about our licences, the amounts we paid for them (COAI is, right now, for instance, engaged in a bitter fight over Reliance/Tata offering ‘3G’ wireless broadband which, it insists, is not allowed in their ‘2G’ licence!).
Of course he’s right, but this is where the new Trai chief’s skills come in, in realising that telcos have to be compensated for changing these rights, but that it has to be done (the migration package of the New Telecom Policy of 1999 is a great example of such compensation); and in powerfully presenting his/her case (how many politicians will prevent a recommendation that, if its impact is well-publicised, will result in phone bills coming crashing down?).
To a certain extent, Pradip Baijal recognised this fundamental shift in technology when he came up with his unified access licence, but there were two problems with this — one, it was done with the express purpose of favouring Reliance and second, he didn’t even think there was an issue of compensating the existing players for changing the terms of their licences.
At the end of the day, the issue is not just about whether IAS officials are cornering all regulatory jobs (of course they are), the issue’s about whether they understand their new role, it’s even more about whether those selecting regulators know what they should be looking for.