Industry body TAIPA Wednesday claimed that telecom infrastructure provisioning in Rajasthan circle had come to near stand-still following a "retrograde order" by the state's Department of Urban Development and Housing (UDH), and sought urgent intervention of the telecom ministry on the issue.
The orders pertain to regularising the existing towers as per provisions mentioned in the August 2012 Rajasthan old policy and doubling of annual charges for mobile tower deployments for rural areas.
The Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA) shot off an SOS to Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan flagging the problems being faced by the industry in the state, after numerous submissions made to the state authorities to resolve the crisis did not elicit a response, the industry association said in a statement.
"We are shocked and surprised to see that departments of UDH & Department of LSG (local self government) have issued orders dated February 20, 2019, & March 28, 2018, wherein all the existing towers were asked to be regularised as per provisions mentioned in Rajasthan old policy dated August 31, 2012 thus impeding the complete rollout of the critical telecom infrastructure," TAIPA Director-General Tilak Raj Dua said in a letter to the telecom secretary. The letter is dated July 5.
The recent order issued by the UDH department in February also doubles the annual charges for mobile tower deployments for rural areas to Rs 10,000.
In a separate statement issued here, Dua said Rajasthan is the first state to align their policy with the Centre's Right of Way Rules, 2016.
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"Now, the Department of UDH has taken totally reversal approach by following their erstwhile policy for telecom infrastructure installations and regularisation of existing of mobile towers and totally negating their own policy of February 2017... It is worth noting that there is no-alignment between various wings of the state government for the execution of the policies," he said.
Terming the latest move as retrograde, TAIPA said the lack of response by the state authorities, despite repeated submissions, was "disturbing".
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