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Telecom majors are meeting the union minister today, and ask him to stop imposing 'trivial' penalties on them.
The latest issue dogging the telcos is the penalty that the telecommunications department is looking to levy, for not complying with tower radiation norms.
These penalties all together can be as high as Rs 1,000 crore for the entire industry put together, Rajan Matthews, director general of Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said.
“The telecom operators will talk to the minister regarding these penalties as the government is looking to encash bank guarantees. They will ask the ministry to normalise such trivial penalties,” he said.
All the telecom companies including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications and others are going to request the telecom minister Kapil Sibal, to take a re-look at the issue.
The government of India has stringent norms relating to electronic magnetic frequency (EMF) emissions of telecom towers.
“The norms in India, require the radiations are kept ten times lower than those prescribed by the WHO. On top of that, they pick the highest slab of penalty. This is a huge problem from the industry,” said Hemant Joshi, senior director, Deloitte Haskins and Sells.
Maintaining such low levels of radiation will have an impact on the call quality, experts say. “There are already so many call drops,” said Joshi.
Industry also believes that telecom operators might have to go ahead and seek relief if the issue is not resolved. “Before going to the court, the telecom operators want to meet the minister,” said Matthews.
Joshi believes that challenging goals like radiation norms that are more stringent that international norms are to be set, the government should work with telcom companies. He believes that compliance with such norms will lead burden the telcos, as it becomes yet another cost.
“First of all, it has to be seen if these norms are required in the first place. It will lead to all sorts of issues in urban and rural areas, as cell sites are not easily available,” said Joshi. He also believes that the government should take a 'wholesome' view of the tower radiation issue.
