Liberating the waves of digital benefits, new telecom policy aims at creating 40 lakh jobs by 2022

New Delhi, May 2: Liberating the digital wave in the country, the government has released a new draft of new telecom policy with an aim to create 40 lakh new jobs by 2022. The National Digital Communication Policy of 2018 has swayed the wave by ensuring broadband coverage at 50 Mbps for every citizen.

The National Digital Communications Policy draft intends to accomplish provisioning of broadband for all, creating 40 lakh additional jobs in the digital communications sector and enhancing the contribution of the digital communications space to 8% of India’s GDP from about 6% in 2017.

Under the proposed draft the government also aims to provide fixed line services to almost 50% of the households and also make provisions for landline portability services. Further it also suggests in providing universal broadband coverage at 50 mbps to every citizen and 1gbps connectivity to all gram panchayat of India by 2020 and 10 gbps by 2022.

To serve this objective, the policy further aims to pursue regulatory reforms to ensure that the regulatory structures and processes remain relevant, transparent, accountable and forward-looking. Additionally, the policy aims to remove regulatory barriers and reduce the regulatory burden that hampers investments, innovation and consumer interest. Adopting ‘Optimal Pricing of Spectrum’ will ensure sustainable and affordable access to digital communication.

Enhancing the ease of doing business in the telecom sector, the draft has proposed to woe the debt ridden telecom sector by reviewing license fees, spectrum usage charges, universal service obligation fund levy all of which add to cost of telecom services.

This new policy will also encourage giving less regulations to promote data usage among the masses, providing WiFi hotspots to the people giving internet access. It also attempts to introduce various fiscal and non-fiscal benefits for development of telecom clusters around cable landing stations to foster innovation in digital communications technologies.