Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on 2 May, 2023 has released the recommendations on consultation paper ‘Ease of Doing Business in Telecom and Broadcasting Sector’. The TRAI has suo-moto floated a Consultation paper on “Ease of Doing Business in telecom and Broadcasting Sector” on December 08, 2021. Written comments and counter-comments on the Consultation Paper were invited from the stakeholders by February 09, 2022 and February 23, 2022 respectively.
The salient features of these recommendations are as below:
- A user-friendly, transparent and responsive digital single window system based portal should be established. The portal should be enabled with new digital technologies for achieving end-to-end inter-departmental online processes.
- Each Ministry should establish a standing EoDB Committee to regularly review, simplify and update the existing processes and ensure ease of doing business as an on-going activity.
- MIB, DoT, DOS, MeitY and other agencies should specify stage-wise timelines for all the processes including initial as well as additional permissions, which should be mentioned in the respective Guidelines/ policy and updated in the Citizen Charter.
- The Government may consider and grant ‘Infrastructure Status’ to ‘Broadcasting and Cable Services Sector’.
- WPC should charge the spectrum royalty fee for temporary uplinking of live events on pro-rata basis for actual number of days of the event.