ISLAMABAD ( BMZ REPORT )
The ceremony celebrating the launch of the Telecommunications Policy 2015 was held in Islamabad today. The Minister of State for IT was the Chief Guest on the occasion. The ceremony was attended by the Secretary IT, Chairman PTA, ED FAB, senior officials of MoIT, PTA, FAB, CEOs/Heads of Telecom Companies and academia.
The CEOs/Heads of the Cellular Mobile Operators appreciated the efforts of Ministry on issuance of this long due policy and congratulated on winning the “global Achievers Award”. They declared Telecom Policy as a landmark achievement and a forward looking document. It was lauded that under the leadership of Minister of State, Pakistan has re-emerged on international arena. The industry assured to work in tandem with government to achieve the vision of Accelerated Digitization, envisioned in the policy.
The Member (Telecom), Ministry of IT, delivered a comprehensive presentation highlighting key aspects of the policy.
Minister informed the participants that when the present Government took office, several pending matters of national importance such as 3G/4G auction, Grey Traffic and Telecommunications Policy were taken up on priority. In this regard, the positions at, PTA, MoIT and its attached departments, which were lying vacant for a considerable period of time, were filled with highly qualified and richly experienced professionals.
Since then the Ministry of IT achieved several milestones such as policy intervention to curb grey traffic, which resulted in the increase of incoming traffic from less than 400 million minutes to over 1.5 billion minutes per month. Also, Pakistan re-emerged at the international fora by winning the ITU Council seat last year and has been very active on all associated and related fora, auction of spectrum for 3G/4G and many other steps for underserved and unserved areas of Pakistan.
The telecom policy review was due in 2008 which was not done during the term of the previous government. Our elected Government, after taking office in June 2013, took up the review and integration of policies on priority basis. Allhamadulillah, now we have a visionary telecom policy 2015 approved by the ECC and its implementation begins.
Telecommunications Policy 2015 is expected to boost the Telecommunications as well as ICT sector markets spur socio economic development and will act as a catalyst towards achieving knowledge based society with digital inclusion of all segments of our society. The CEO,s of all 5 operators and Chairman PTA, whilst talking on the occasion ,congratulated the Minister for being recognized by UN as Global achiever and thanked the Government and regulator for its inclusive and consultative approach and leading the sector in accordance with best practices and assured of their cooperation going forward for its implementation.