Government wants healthy telcos: DoT secretary Aruna Sundararajan

NEW DELHI: The government wants telecom players to grow in a healthy and sustained manner and will continue to engage with them in order to understand the magnitude of their problem, Aruna Sundararajan, who has been given full charge as the telecom secretary told ET.

Sundararajan, who was IT secretary and led the government Digital Payments push after demonetisation exercise, also hinted that the government may be open to look at changing some regulations if considered necessary though she conceded that so far the regulatory framework has worked well for the growth of the sector.

She said that the government will have a lot of engagement with the telecom sector to understand what is the magnitude of the problem, and how to address that problem. On the agenda are new polices around new areas such as Internet of Things, Machine-to-Machine Communication, etc. The government will also try to push for manufacturing of telecom equipment, security of networks among other things.

On criticism about the telecom sector being overly regulated, she said it is because telecom is an infrastructure sector and is a utility so to some extent regulation is critical for its ‘orderly’ growth.