Cloud hangs over future of several of Maran's telecom initiatives

14 May 2007

New Delhi: The abrupt resignation of Dayanidhi Maran as communications and IT minister from the union cabinet could leave the fate of several of his initiatives under a cloud.

Measures initiated by him to provide cheaper bandwidth, broadband services and roaming rates, bring about the 3G policy and divert Internet traffic within the country by hosting servers in India could get stuck after his exit.

Maran, 41, succeeded in hard-selling India to global telecom and IT equipment manufacturers. He got Nokia, the world''s largest mobile phone maker, and Ericsson and Motorola to finally set up a manufacturing unit in India. While top global US IT companies set up projects in the country during his tenure.

Maran was successful in brining the first chip manufacturing facility into the country when AMD signed a technological pact with Semindia, an NRI-backed consortium for a 3-billion dollar project in Hyderabad.

Some of his telecom initiatives like the access deficit charge have led to prolonged legal wrangling, in keeping with the litigation-ridden precedent of his predecessors Arun Shourie, Pramod Mahajan and Ram Vilas Paswan over the issues of disinvestments, battles over policy between CDMA v/s GSM operators, etc, were at their peak.

Maran stepping in to the domain of telecom regulator TRAI on the crucial issue of access deficit charge, a fee paid by private operators to BSNL for its rural and remote area networks, despite the TRAI Act empowering the regulation of tariffs and ADC as TRAI''s prerogative.