Pending draft policy of Madhya Pradesh hinders development of telecom infrastructure
Tower and Infrastructure Providers’ Association (TAIPA), industry association for leading Telecommunication Infrastructure Providers such as Bharti Infratel, ATC towers, GTL Infrastructure, Reliance Infratel, Indus towers and Tower Vision, has highlighted that the draft policy of Madhya Pradesh is pending for notification since 2015 and imposes issues such as multiple fee levies of up to Rs.1 lakh, restriction on the location of towers, limited land availability of 100 sq. metres. on government lands and restriction of mast height up to 20 metres on government lands, lack of Single-Window Clearance, multiple NoCs and permission of tower is limited to a period of 5 years only, etc, which eventually hinders the momentum of tower installation across the state.
The draft tower policy pending for notification since 2015 is not at all aligned with the Department of Telecommunication Indian Telegraph Right of Way (RoW) policy notified by the Central Government in November 2016.
The RoW policy dated November 2016 has enabling features such as no restriction on the location of telecom towers, single-window clearance mechanism, defined time-period for approvals, appointment of Nodal officers, nominal administrative fees, deemed approval, etc extensively supporting the Digital India mission.
While highlighting the issue, Tilak Raj Dua, Director General, TAIPA, said, “The states should align their policies with guidelines issued by the Centre in order to ensure deployment of critical telecom tower infrastructure across the state. Issues such as call drops, network outage and connectivity gaps, etc are being faced by subscribers due to the number of limitations imposed on the mobile tower installation, hindering tower installations across the state.”
The industry has also highlighted through a number of representations and submissions to respective authorities for notifying a comprehensive tower policy which addresses the provisioning of seamless telecom infrastructure rollout aligned with the RoW policy.
It is worth highlighting that other Indian states such as Jharkhand, Haryana, Odisha, Rajasthan and Kerala have aligned their tower policies with the Central Government guidelines.
Today, Madhya Pradesh has more than 31,207 mobile towers mounted with more than 98,540 BTSs serving 71.6 million wireless telecommunication subscribers. In the near future, Madhya Pradesh state needs to significantly increase the towers and BTS count in order to connect the unconnected, to ensure seamless network connectivity and roll out future technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Artificial intelligence, etc.
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