NEW DELHI: The Union Government on Monday named senior bureaucrat P D Vaghela as the new Chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The 1986- batch Gujarat cadre IAS officer will replace R S Sharma, who has held the post since 2015. Sharma was set to retire on September 30 this year and had been granted a two-year extension on his original three-year term in August 2018.
According to the note from the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, Vaghela will serve as TRAI Chairman for “three years or till he attains the age of 65”. He is currently the Secretary of the Union Government’s Department of Pharmaceuticals and was due to retire on Wednesday.
Vaghela will take over the communications sector watchdog at a pivotal time. With the telecom industry having recently emerged from the brief, but intense, bout of consolidation of the past few years,Vaghela will need to mount a lookout for the very real dangers of a communications monopoly—which the government has repeatedly called undesirable.
He will also likely have to shepherd the roll-out of the long-awaited 5G telecommunications frameworks. While the 5G spectrum auctions have been long-delayed, even the most pessimistic believe they will take place before Vaghela’s term ends three years later. He will also inherit challenges in the television segment, where the merging of traditional cable TV with fibre-optic internet is resulting in a converged medium. Experts say, the amalgamation of the fixed-line and cable TV markets into a single entity with different dynamics will require considerable regulatory dexterity.