Employees’ union of Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has piled pressure on NTA Board and management to issue an ultimatum to United Telecom Limited (UTL) to collect unified licence. The union on Tuesday provided one month’s time for the telecom to do so.

 

The demand to hand over the unified licence to UTL and ensure competition in the market is one of the 15 demands put forth by the NTA Independent Employees’ Union on Tuesday. “NTA has to give an ultimatum to UTL to claim its licence and if it doesn’t, the earlier decision to issue the permit has to be cancelled,” said Achyuta Nanda Mishra, president of the union.

 

The decision to assign unified licence to UTL and Smart Telecom was made in April last year. Though Smart Telecom has taken the licence, UTL has been dilly dallying saying that it will claim the licence only after going through the detailed verdict of the Supreme Court. However, NTA is yet to receive the verdict from the court, although the court had given a go ahead to the licence regime in September 2013, scrapping cases filed against the licence provision.

 

Unified licence allows the company obtaining it to provide services that include GSM mobile, local, domestic trunk and international long distance calls. Smart Telecom which took the licence immediately after the NTA decision is delaying service expansion due to its internal dispute regarding share ownership. 

 

Amid snail-paced network expansion work of Smart Telecom and Nepal Satellite Telecom (NST), the union has also complained of NTA failing to monitor the companies. The 15-point demand includes carrying out monitoring of service delivered by Smart Telecom and NST, maintaining transparency in NTA, recruiting employees in vacant posts, and automation of NTA office. 

 

Mishra said that inefficiency at NTA had indicated towards possibilities of ‘black marketing’ in issuing permits and the union has asked the authority to start monitoring network expansion of Smart Telecom and NST within a month. “Companies are only holding licences instead of expanding service as specified in their permits and NTA is least bothered,” he added.

 

When asked about the demands of the union, Ananda Raj Khanal, officiating chief of NTA, said that they had just been managing NTA for complications in the regulatory body for a long time. “NTA does not exist in isolation and we haven’t had a chairman here for the last one-and-a-half years to make prompt policy decisions,” he argued.

 

The union is at loggerheads with the Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC), NTA Board and management since a long time over various issues, including provision that requires taking consent of MoIC for facilities to be offered to NTA employees.