Top telecom body split over penalty on Airtel, Voda Idea

NEW DELHI: The Digital Communications Commission (DCC), which met last week, was split on the decision to impose cumulative penalties of Rs 3,050 crore on Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Of the seven members present at the meeting, two opposed the levy while a third backed an extended tenure for paying the penalty, said people familiar with the matter.As reported by ET, the DCC — an inter-ministerial panel — went with the majority view and backed the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) proposal to levy penalties on the two telcos. In the absence of a mechanism for graded payments, the DCC made no recommendation on this. All decisions by the DCC have to be formally approved by the telecom minister.Trai had recommended the penalties on the grounds that in 2016, when Jio had launched its services, Airtel as well as Vodafone and Idea Cellular (which were two separate companies then) had denied the new company adequate points of interconnection (PoIs), thereby adversely impacting the services of the RIL-owned telco.Two members of the inter-ministerial panel who are said to have opposed the levies are former finance secretary SC Garg and telecom department’s member (services) Debatosh Manna. 70474421 Meet a Day Before Garg Shifted to PowerThe meeting took place on July 24, a day before Garg was transferred from economic affairs to the power ministry. Text messages to both the officials elicited no response till the time of going to press.Garg is believed to have argued that the onus of ensuring quality of services lay on Jio, and not Airtel or Vodafone Idea. “He (Garg) said the responsibility of ensuring quality of service lies solely with the service provider — in this case, Reliance Jio — and if any fine should be imposed, it should be on that carrier,” the person said. The former finance secretary was of the view that given the health of the sector, the quantum of the fine should be reduced, the person added.Manna, in his dissenting view, said that due to lack of clarity over Jio’s launch date, older telcos weren’t obliged to give it points of interconnection. “Telecom service providers were in the dark about the commercial launch of Jio,” Manna is believed to have said. The member (services) objected to the three-year-old Trai-recommended penalty on the grounds that the obligation on carriers to provide PoIs even during the testing phase is not clearly established. He is believed to have said that operators were responsible for providing adequate PoIs only after the launch of commercial services and not during the trial phase. Hence, he said, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea shouldn’t be held responsible for any wrongdoing. His position is similar to that taken by Airtel and Vodafone Idea, which have contended that since they didn’t know the date of Jio’s launch, they weren’t obliged to provide PoIs in such large numbers to it. The two insisted that they had provided adequate PoIs. The five members in favour of the penalties were telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant, IT secretary Ajay Sawhney, telecom department’s member (finance) Anuradha Mitra and member (technology) Shiwa Shankar Singh. Of these, one official was in favour of a graded payment schedule.

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