566 mobile towers still remain sealed in Delhi - TAIPA

Tower and Infrastructure Providers’ Association (TAIPA), an industry body for Telecommunication Infrastructure Providers, has assessed that 566 mobile towers have been sealed by Delhi Municipal Corporations out of 11,500 total mobile towers in Delhi, despite the fee deposit of Rs.48 crore lying with municipal corporations. While 1,150 mobile tower sites are ready for deployment, however these still await permission. This altogether is impacting the overall ease-of-doing business, development of a robust telecom infrastructure and addressing the growing the data needs of customers.

The Delhi Tower Policy, 2010 was challenged by the telecom industry in Delhi High Court imposing issues such as exorbitant permission fee of Rs.5 lakh for 5 years only and Rs.1 lakh per service provider for sharing and restriction on locations, etc.

For ease-of-doing business, in January 2017, Delhi High Court referred mediation settlement was signed by the industry with the municipal corporations offering provisions such as deemed approval for 30 days, appointment of nodal officers, documentation as per DoT guidelines, 2013 and fee part was also renegotiated to Rs.1 lakh to Rs.2 lakh and revised guidelines to be issued in line with the DoT advisory guidelines, 2013.

However, even after a year, the mediation settlement has still not been implemented down the line with the municipal corporations and has resulted in the sealing of critical infrastructure amounting to Rs.113 crore approximately and no new permissions have been processed for the installation of telecom infrastructure.

It is worth highlighting that all the municipal commissioners have issued directions for the implementation of mediation settlement agreement. However, representatives of various departments down the line have been found wanting in following the same.

While highlighting the bone of contention, Tilak Raj Dua, Director General, TAIPA, said, “Non-implementation of mediation settlement and lack of comprehensive tower policy in Delhi is creating knotty situations for the development of a robust telecom infrastructure. It is high time that the telecom infrastructure need to be treated as the essential critical infrastructure like others such as roads, transport, water supply, etc, as the formation of new Digital India solely depends upon the enhanced telecom infrastructure. These street furniture enables emergency services, e-governance, e-health and e-education services and in the near future it will enable newer technologies such as 5G, VR, AI, IoT, etc.”

The telecom tower industry has held numerous meetings with municipal corporations of Delhi to discuss the implementation of mediation settlement and the issues industry has been facing for more than 8 years now.

After the notification of Delhi Tower Policy,  2010, the Government of India has notified two enabling guidelines/rules for enabling seamless provisioning of telecom infrastructure, i.e. DoT advisory guidelines, 2013 and Right of Way (RoW) rules, 2016. Most recent RoW rules, November 2016 offer salient features such as no restriction on the location of telecom towers, a single-window clearance mechanism, defined time-period for approvals, appointment of nodal officers, nominal administrative fees, deemed approvals, etc extensively supporting the Digital India mission.

Dua further added, “These avoidable delays in the implementation of policies, notification of policies and suo-moto coercive actions on sealing the mobile towers lead to solemn issues such as slow internet speed, network congestion, call drops, etc. The overall regressive act impacts the ease-of-doing business and forms a misconception that the industry is not making adequate investments. There is an immediate need to notify a comprehensive mobile tower policy for enabling speedy installation of telecom infrastructure in Delhi in order to make city a world-class superfast internet metropolitan.”

Today, Delhi alone has around 11,500 mobile towers which cater to more than 58 million wireless telecommunication subscribers. These towers are shared among TSPs with the average tenancy ratio of 2.2. It is imperative to mention that Delhi needs to double the tower count in the near future to address the growing need of data and making inception of newer technologies a practical equation.