Telecom Commission announces creation of post of telecom ombudsman
02 May 2018
1
Besides clearing the proposals for allowing mobile services and use of internet telephony in flights and ships, the Telecom Commission also today announced the creation of a post of ombudsman to address consumer grievances.
"Almost all recommendations by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on this have been accepted. We are expediting the process (to start) and within 3-4 months it should be ready. We will be operationalising this decision immediately," telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan said.
She said there were only two exception to Trai's recommendations. The sector regulator said that foreign satellites and foreign gateways should also be permitted, "but there had been an earlier committee of secretaries meeting that decided that it should be an Indian satellite or a Department of Space approved satellite and the gateway should be in India."
"We have to create a separate category of licensee, called In-Flight Connectivity Provider. This will also be applicable for ships. Re1 will be the token licence fee. It is applicable above 3,000 metres," Sundararajan said.
She also said that the matter need not go to the cabinet for approval.
The commission also approved the long-pending proposal of forming a Telecom Ombudsman.
"We get 10 million grievances per quarter. A three tier mechanism has been proposed. First will be within the telecom service providers the first level of complaints can be lodged. Then if the consumer is not satisfied with the response, each TSP will set up an appellate mechanism within itself to which the person can complaint. After that if it does not work they can move to consumer grievance redressal forums," Sundararajan said.
"On top will be a Telecom Ombudsman created by TRAI. The TRAI has said they do not have the powers to create, therefore, it has now been proposed to give them powers to create an ombudsman mechanism. The idea is they can have one ombudsman per TSP, or one ombudsman per region or as many ombudsman as they feel are necessary. This will bring in much better and more satisfactory grievance redressal into the telecom sector. This will be done in priority basis. It will require amendment of TRAI Act," she added.
Among other important decisions, the panel also approved the decision on Internet telephony. "It will be operationalising it immediately. We expect that this will give a fillip to VoIP telephony through the data networks," the telecom secretary said.
It also approved 12 major recommendations of TRAI on ease of doing business.
She said proliferation of broadband through public Wi-Fi network, has also been accepted.
"Except that we have asked TRAI to work out an operational framework and all the members of the Telecom Commission felt that this is an extremely important recommendation because it will give a big fillip to the growth of public Wi-Fi hotspots in India and will create a new category of service providers through the public data office aggregators (PDOA)," Sundararajan said.
"The PDOs will be a significant job creation opportunity because right now we do not have many Wi-Fi hotspots and the idea is to proliferate this in a very large scale. So this was seen as a huge catalyst in that direction. We will be working with TRAI to operationalise it with immediate effect," she added.
The panel also approved two items related to Universal Service Obligation Fund and eight state detailed project reports on BharatNet project were approved.
