National Telecom Policy

The vision of the National Telecom Policy (2012) is to provide secure, reliable, affordable and high quality converged telecommunication services anytime, anywhere for an accelerated inclusive  socioeconomic development.

The objectives/thrust areas of the policy are as follows:

1. Increase rural tele-density from the current level of around 39 to 70 by the year 2017 and 100 by the year 2020.
2. Provide affordable and reliable broadband-on-demand by the year 2015 and to achieve 175 million broadband connections by the year 2017 and 600 million by the year 2020 at minimum 2 Mbps download speed and making available higher speeds of at least 100 Mbps on demand.
3. Enable citizens to participate in and contribute to e-governance in key sectors like health, education, skill development, employment, governance, banking, etc. to ensure equitable and inclusive growth.
4. Provide high speed and high quality broadband access to all village panchayats through a combination of technologies by the year 2014 and progressively to all villages and habitations by 2020.
5. Promote innovation, indigenous R&D and manufacturing to serve domestic and global markets, by increasing skills and competencies.
6. Simplify the licensing framework to further extend converged high quality services across the nation including rural and remote areas. This will not cover content regulation.
7. Strive to create One Nation – One License across services and service areas.
8. Achieve One Nation – Full Mobile Number Portability and work towards One Nation – Free Roaming.
9. Reposition the mobile phone from a mere communication device to an instrument of empowerment that combines communication with proof of identity, fully secure financial and other transaction capability, multi-lingual services and a whole range of other capabilities that ride on them and transcend the literacy barrier.
10. Deliver high quality seamless voice, data, multimedia and broadcasting services on converged networks for enhanced service delivery to provide superior experience to users.
11. Optimise delivery of services to consumers irrespective of their devices or locations by fixed-mobile convergence, thus making available valuable spectrum for other wireless services.
12. Recognise telecom as Infrastructure Sector to realise true potential of ICT for development.
13. Enhanced and continued adoption of green policy in telecom and incentivise use of renewable energy sources for sustainability.
14. Protect consumer interest by promoting informed consent, transparency and accountability in quality of service, tariff, usage etc.
15. Achieve substantial transition to new Internet Protocol (IPv 6) in the country in a phased and time bound manner by 2020 and encourage an ecosystem for provision of a significantly large bouquet of services on IP platform.