User:Aravind V R/National Telecom Policy

National Telecom Policy is formulated by the Department of Technology under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of the Government of India in 2012. 

Background
India is one of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world. Telecommunications, along with Information Technology contributes to about 3% to India’s GDP and has greatly accelerated the growth of the economic and social sectors. There was s significant penetration of telecommunications in India in the 2000s. The number of telephone connections, at the end of February 2012, was 943 million. The government had formulated NTP 1999 and NTP 2012 with an intention to transform the country into an empowered and inclusive knowledge-based society, using telecommunications as a platform.

Key Targets

 * 1) Create knowledge based society through proliferation of broadband – provide broadband on demand by 2015. Achieve target of 175 million broadband users by 2017 and 600 million by 2020.
 * 2) To promote R&D & product development in telecom
 * 3) To make India a global hub for telecom equipment manufacturing
 * 4) Increase rural tele-density from 39% to 70% by 2017 and to 100% by 2020.
 * 5) 80% of telecom networks to be domestically manufactured by 2020
 * 6) Provide high speed and high quality broadband access to all village panchayats by 2014

Consumer initiatives

 * 1) Abolish roaming charges
 * 2) Mobile Number Portability, which is currently restricted to a circle-level basis, to be enhanced to allow consumers to retain their mobile numbers when they move to a new city or any location in the country without having to pay 'roaming charges'.
 * 3) Strengthen grievance redressal mechanisms
 * 4) Broadband speeds to be revised to 512 kbps & further to 2 Mbps by 2015 & 100 Mbps by 2020
 * 5) Regulator to enhance consumer awareness on tariffs, services
 * 6) Strengthen consumer protection act

Spectrum

 * 1) Free up 300 MHz of airwaves for commercial telephony by 2017 & another 200 MHz of spectrum by 2020
 * 2) All future spectrum allocations will be priced at market rates
 * 3) Allow spectrum pooling, sharing & trading
 * 4) Prepare a roadmap for spectrum availability for next 5 years
 * 5) Reserve small amounts of spectrum in certain frequencies for indigenous development of products & technologies
 * 6) Enact 'Spectrum Act', to deal with all issues connected with mobile permits, including re-farming, pricing of this resource, withdrawal of allotted spectrum and norms for sharing and trading.
 * 7) To promote use of white space with low power devices

For mobile permits

 * 1) To frame an exit policy for new entrants to surrender their mobile permits & airwaves
 * 2) Delink licence from spectrum. Make mobile permits technology neutral and divide them into 2 categories – Network Service Operator & Service Delivery Operator
 * 3) Allow sharing of networks
 * 4) Regulate value added services, especially the carriage charge
 * 5) To provide clear rules for renewal of all mobile permits
 * 6) To put in place legal, regulatory and licensing framework for convergence of services, networks and devices
 * 7) Move towards an unified licensing regime that will allow operators to offer any service
 * 8) Address the Right of Way issues in setting up of telecom infrastructure
 * 9) Relaxed M&A norms to allow consolidation