Context: Recently, Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA) urged for quickly enhancing the telecom network capacity to cope with the rising data traffic amidst nation-wide lockdown.

• With data traffic in the country surging by at least 30% in the past few days amid most people working from home.
• It said there is a need to quickly enhance telecom network capacity for which the States need to align their policies with the Centre's Right of Way (RoW) 2016 norms.
• Telecom services come under essential services and thereby are exempted from the lockdown.
• To maintain data usage and smooth functioning of telecom services 24/7 , the telecom sector needs critical, robust infrastructure.
• The states need to align their policies with the Centre's Right of Way (RoW) 2016 norms.
• With more than three years gone, only 16 States out of 36 States/UT’s have broadly aligned their policy with RoW Policy 2016.

About TAIPA

• Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association(TAIPA) was constituted in 2011 as an industry representative body registered under the Indian Society registration act, 1860.
• All leading independent telecom infrastructure providers like Bharti Infratel, Indus Towers, ATC India Tower Corp., GTL Infrastructure, Tower Vision and Reliance Infrastructure are the members of the Society which visualizes itself to be the official voice for the Telecom Infrastructure industry.
• The association is dedicated to interact, discuss and deliberate with the Ministries, Policy Makers, Regulators, Financial institutions and Technical bodies etc. for the knowledge collection & dissemination for promotion of healthy growth in telecom services.
• The telecom infrastructure providers provide an Integrated Neutral Host Platform that is used by diverse and often competing operators resulting in the rapid deployment of networks supporting over 1.3 billion mobile subscribers.
• The new and upcoming technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence and virtual reality will be highly successful since the easy availability and accessibility of shared towers, a key input for the growth of this sector.
• The role and objectives of this society is primarily to be one-voice of the industry and emphasize the need to bring ‘Telecom Infrastructure Services’ under key utilities segment, to promote sharing of valuable resources, to improve competitiveness, to develop a unified industry voice on issues affecting tower erection, maintenance and service work etc.

The key objectives of the industry body are as follow:

• To ensure that the industry is given ‘Key Infrastructure’ status
• To promote formulation of ‘National Telecom Infrastructure Policy’ mandating the sharing of Towers
• To ensure ‘No Charges’ being put on IP-1s in terms of License Fee, etc. for providing cost-optimized services
• To mandate Authorities in-charge of Highways, Ports, Rails etc to share Right of Way
• To formulate uniform policy across India with regard to tower setup, maintenance and service work
• To organize a single-window clearance of all Municipal and Statutory approvals
• To get financial support out of USO Fund for every tower built / operating in Rural regions of the nation
• To organize incentives for deploying Alternate Energy Technologies
• To get further support from the Government by Tax Holidays & other Concessions, etc.

About Right of Way (RoW) rules,2016

• Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued Right of Way (RoW) rules for rollout of communication networks.
• It aims to facilitate the installation of mobile towers, optic fibre and copper cables in a time-bound, non-discretionary manner.
• The rules aim to rationalise administrative expenses across the country to a maximum of Rs 1000 per km for fibre, and a maximum of Rs 10,000 per application for overhead towers.
• It provides for fast-tracking decisions on RoW permits within 60 days after application