The National Advisory Council (NAC), headed by Sonia Gandhi, chairperson, UPA has suggested that the government should come up with a telecom plan exclusive to North Eastern region of the country, says news reports.

NAC has said that given the importance of telecom sector in contributing to the growth and development of essential social and economic services, the government needs to look at telecom services in the North East Region (NER) as ‘essential service’ and not as ‘obligation.’ It has requested the government to come up with a time-bound implementation of telecom plan for NER.

According to the NAC the telecom plan for NER requires close monitoring and review jointly by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Union Ministry of development of North Eastern Region (DoNER). It has recommended that DOT and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited may adopt ‘farthest first’ principle and give utmost priority vis-a-vis rest of the country in completing the projects under such dedicated plan for the NER. For this purpose, additional senior manpower may be posted to the region during the 12th Five Year Plan.

The NAC has observed that actual expenditure incurred by the DoT has never exceeded 10 per cent of gross budgetary support (GBS) allocation for NER over the last five years. The state wise utilisation of Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) reveals that there is a scope for equitable utilisation of USOF to remove regional imbalances particularly in the NER.

The NAC has recommended subsidising royalty charges for NER so that microwave technology can be deployed in large scale. It has also sought subsidisation in the transponder bandwidth charges.