Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done well to direct his office to look into the call drops issue and the standoff between cellphone operators and communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and regulator TRAI over the contentious issue.
Call drops have been going on for over two years and consumers have been paying the price for the umpteen calls they have to make to complete a call. Not to mention the inconvenience caused when you don’t get signal at various places. According to Mr Prasad, telecom companies are not making investments to keep up with the galloping growth in the number of subscribers.
Telecom operators trot out figures totalling a little over Rs 9 lakh crore, of which Rs 1,34,000 crore was spent in 2014-15 alone on infrastructure and capital equipment to improve connectivity. They say they don’t get cooperation from state governments and local bodies in putting up cell towers because of radiation scare.
Over 10,000 cell sites have reportedly been made non-operational due to some of these reasons across cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Patna, Jaipur, etc when they require at least one lakh cell towers to enable a digital economy. They also complain of the lack of spectrum compared to the spectrum that their global counterparts get. Of course, Mr Prasad says they have enough spectrum. While both sides stick to their positions at the expense of consumers, we hope that the Prime Minister’s Office will be able to resolve this in a time-bound manner.
