The telecom industry has supported the recommendation of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology to bring the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) under one umbrella.

The recommendation was part of the 11th report of the standing committee presented in the Lok Sabha last week.

Telecom operators’ body — the Cellular Operators Association of India — on Wednesday said that if the government decides on the merger, it would improve transparency and compliance.

“In whatever format this is implemented, it will lead to a focused and composite handling of issues, thereby formulating policies which are equally applicable to all the ministries concerned and reduce multiple policy formulations on the same subject, thus improving transparency and compliances,” said COAI director-general S.P. Kochhar.

The industry body pointed out the need to apply one set of policies and regulations that are applicable to both telecom service providers (TSPs) and over-the-top (OTT) service providers in the domain of spam/fraud messages.

“While telcos are governed by the Telecom Commercial Communication Customer Preference Regulation (TCCPR) 2018 and noticeable results have been observed in the spam/unwanted forms of communication via the TSPs, the app-based communications not under the same regulation remain unchecked and are becoming a growing concern for the consumers and the government,” he said.

“We are hopeful that this step will help in uniformly addressing the issue of spam, telemarketing across all communication channels and help remove/restrict the scourge of unwanted/fraud communications, thus providing much-needed relief to the consumers,” he said.

The Union communications ministry last week said that the department of telecommunications and WhatsApp have collaborated to prevent misuse of telecom resources for digital frauds and scams.