Monday, December 7, 2015

MARAN'S DISGRACEFUL INTRIGUES

FROM BUSINESS WORLD OF 12 JULY 2006.


A regulator emasculated


Prospects of a cabinet reshuffle are casting various reflections. Who are going to be moved or dropped? Only the PM and the President (I mean of the Congress) know. Who think they are going to be shifted? The best indicator of this is what I call the CPI or the Compulsive Proximity Index. Go to public occasions to be attended by Sonia Gandhi, preferably one where people can move about – such as a book launch on the lawns of Flagstaff House, once the residence of the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, now known as Teen Murti House. Measure the average distance maintained by a minister between Sonia Gandhi and himself. Correlate the direction of movements of Sonia Gandhi and the ministers. The shorter the average distance, and the higher the correlation between the directions, the more insecure the minister. It is some time since I did this exercise, for these open-air occasions decline in summer. But the last time I undertook the measurements, Shivraj Patil emerged champion.
Then there is the question: who should be reshuffled? The answer, to my mind, is clear and urgent: Dayanidhi Maran. Not that he has performed particularly badly, or that he has stepped out of line. In fact, if one looks through the list of his predecessors – who include such personages as Sukh Ram and Jagmohan – he is following well known precedents.
He is minister of telecommunications – an especially covetable department from a certain ministerial point of view. Amongst the enterprises controlled by this department are two huge ones – BSNL and MTNL.
There was a time when Department of Telecommunications had a monopoly and maintained a permanent shortage of telephones. At that time, a minister who kept on its right side could oblige his friends, benefactors and beneficiaries with telephones. It was a valuable privilege that many a politician would have given his life for. Nowadays DoT’s companies have private competitors, so one can simply walk across the street and get a telephone from a corner shop. So a minister is not so sought after. But still, DoT controls enormous capital budgets and lucrative appointments.
A minister that does its bidding can achieve much happiness; one who tries to bring it to heel would have to be unusually strong-minded and uninterested in the material world. The only minister who fulfilled these qualifications in recent past was Arun Shourie. He appointed his telecommunications secretary chairman of TRAI. Between the two they tried to sort out the mess created by previous ministers. With the active help of DoT, they had created a licence regime which gave private operators very limited territories whereas BSNL, DoT’s aged baby, could operate across all circles and services. This unequal competition led to periodic crises. Shourie’s and Baijal’s solution was abolition of boundaries between licences – a single universal licence for all services.
Luckily for DoT, the NDA government was turfed out before the two could do material damage, and DoT got the personable, youthful, reasonable Dayanidhi Maran as minister. It has never looked back since. TRAI has continued to work on a unified licence regime. But it is wasting its time: the minister is not interested. For if licences were unified, which private operator would come and kowtow before the minister?
In July 2004, TRAI put out the idea of a common interconnection exchange. The idea was simple. If there were n operators, they would need n(n-1) interconnections if calls were to pass directly from any operator to any other. But if there was a common interconnection exchange, the number would fall to n. A great idea; but it would displace BSNL as the interconnector. So the minister sat on it.
On the ministry’s reference, TRAI produced proposals last November for allocation, utilization, pricing, trading and management of wireless spectrum, which is crucial to mobiles, radio, television and broadband. The present system is that a captive committee of DoT allocates spectrum – which it finds very convenient. TRAI suggested a fairer, more objective and more efficient system. DoT’s response was a deafening silence. To nudge it into action, TRAI produced another paper last May. The result – a dark frown from DoT. 

In these sinister games against the regulator, the minister is a willing and enthusiastic collaborator. If anyone wants evidence, he should go through the files sent to Maran by TRAI. The chairman of TRAI this year is chairman of the international association of telecom regulators. He should be hosting their annual conference in India. Maran has not allowed Baijal to travel abroad; nor has he approved the conference. These are petty intrigues worthy of DoT; but they bring nothing but disgrace to Manmohan Singh’s government.