NEW DELHI: The government will invite fresh application for the position of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) Chairman in the next few days, said two officials of the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) on Monday. The new Chairman of the telecom regulatory, who will succeed PD Vaghela, will assume charges after the general election as the entire selection process takes three to four months.
“After the retirement of PD Vaghela, the government invited applications for his successor. Around five applicants applied for the chairman post but none of them were selected. Thus the government had to re-advertise for the post,” said an official.
The last chairman PD Vaghela superannuated on September 30, 2023, after being in service for three years. Then the government interviewed five candidates for the position but none of them were selected. However, not appointing a full-time Chairman is impacting the works of the regulatory body. Trai currently can’t recommend auction of satellite spectrum to DoT.
As per the rules, DoT can’t auction satellite spectrum until it gets a recommendation from Trai. The regulatory body is without its Chairman for nearly three months now, and currently, the acting Chairperson is Meenakshi Gupta. “Not having a full time Chairman has halted many works in Trai. The most important is allocation of satellite spectrum that involves telecom giants like Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Starlink too,” said another official.
Meanwhile, Bharti backed-OneWeb in October announced it had received the necessary authorisations from the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Centre (IN-SPACe) to launch Eutelsat OneWeb’s commercial satellite broadband services in India. Other companies are Space X’s satellite communication project Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper are yet to get approval. In terms of spectrum allocation, Airtel and OneWeb are pushing for an administrative assignment of spectrum while Jio and Vodafone demand an auction-based approach.