At last, the 115-year-old Indian Telegraph Act 1885 is getting replaced by a more contemporary law, the Indian Telecom Act 2000. A sub-group headed by constitutional expert Fali S. Nariman has completed a draft of the proposed law. This will go for ratification to the Group on Telecom and Information Technology Convergence set up by prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and headed by finance minister Yashwant Sinha before it goes to Parliament for enactment.

One of the main changes in the proposed Indian Telecom Act 2000 will be the ending of "exclusive privileges" granted to the government by the earlier law, which allowed the government to exercise a monopoly in telecom services. The government will only have the right to grant telecom licences.

The new law will deal only with the carriage of information through various channels while abolishing the government’s exclusive privilege of running the telegraph services. The sub-group is of the view that the word "telegraph" should be deleted altogether and replaced with "telecommunications".

Mr Nariman has also suggested several other amendments in the Act to reflect the convergence of telecom, infotech, television and electronics. The sub-group has in fact listed out the direction of the new legislation and its principal features, leaving details to be incorporated through rules to be framed by the appropriate authority.

Senior telecom department officials, who assisted the sub-group in evolving the draft, have said the existing Indian Telegraph Act had all the required provisions to administer a telecom policy, except that it did not contain new concepts like 'bandwidth'. These need to be incorporated. Otherwise, the act even had provision for the government to issue licences to private operators.

Another important change mooted is making it mandatory for every telecom operator to provide interconnectivity. The concept did not exist in the old act, even after it was last amended in 1974, since telecommunications was a government monopoly.

Besides Yashwant Sinha, the committee on convergence consists of managing director of ICICI K V Kamath, law secretary R L Meena, information and broadcasting secretary Y N Chaturvedi, and Anil Kumar of the department of telecommunications.

  also see : Basic and cellular telephone operators in India