Union Cabinet approves NTP - 2012

The Union Cabinet has approved the National Telecom Policy - 2012 (NTP - 2012).

The Cabinet also approved introduction of Unified Licence and has authorised the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to finalise the new unified licensing regime with the approval of minister of communications & IT.

The NTP - 2012 envisions providing secure, reliable, affordable and high quality converged telecommunication services anytime, anywhere for an accelerated inclusive socio-economic development.

The policy focuses on: increasing rural teledensity from the current level of around 39 to 70 by the year 2017 and 100 by the year 2020; repositioning of mobile phone as an instrument of empowerment; broadband for all at a minimum download speed of 2 Mbps; making India a global hub in manufacturing; convergence of network, services and devices; liberalisation of spectrum so that operators can deploy any service and any technology; unified licensing (delinking spectrum from license); achieving one nation by providing full mobile number portability and free roaming; resale of services, voice over internet protocol; cloud computing; and next generation network including IPV6.

The policy seeks to provide a predictable and stable policy regime for a period of about ten years. The policy will be operationalised by bringing out detailed guidelines, as may be considered appropriate, from time to time.

The implementation of NTP 2012 will help in providing an efficient telecommunication infrastructure taking into account the primary objective of maximizing public good by empowering the people of India.

The policy will further enable taking suitable facilitatory measures to encourage existing service providers to rapidly migrate to the new regime in a uniformly liberalised environment with a level playing field.