A few members of AMCHAM’s ICT Committee, led by its Chairman, Mr. Amit Sharma, Executive Vice President and President Asia, ATC India and Co-Chairman, Mr. Naveen Tandon, Director – IEA, AT&T Communication Services India Private Limited, called on Ms. Aruna Sundararajan, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, on 3rd July 2017. From AMCHAM, Ms. Madhvi Kataria, Deputy Director General, joined the meeting.

Mr. Sharma requested the Secretary to interact with industry and AMCHAM members before policies were announced. This would help members to share global best practices with the government. Members also discussed issues relating to equipment security as DoT had made registration of equipment having Wi-Fi mandatory. A member made a request to issue wireless licenses for captive wireless radios since these had not been issued since February 2017 due to the absence of a legal authority to administratively issue spectrum approvals. Another point raised was the need for transparent procedures to link to BharatNet. It was highlighted that the current policy and licensing framework somehow does not address the emerging technological and service formats (SDN, UC, cloud etc). All these are critical for the growth of enterprise data services and may act as a barrier for investment and proliferation of services. The current licenses should be made technologically neutral, as well as service agnostic, in line with objectives of the National Telecom Policy 2012. Secretary, DoT said that she had made a note of all the points and said that she was looking forward to suggestions on 5G, IoT, etc. and said that DoT was also working on a new telecom policy for which industry, including AMCHAM, would be contacted for consultation.