NTP 2018: Govt may ask companies to set-up servers in the country by 2022

The Draft National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2018 is likely to come up with provisions on data sovereignty and ask all companies hosting data of Indians to set-up servers in the country by 2022, PTI reported.

"The NTP is being framed with the vision to give access to all services to people at the click of a button. For most of the things like education, government services and even healthy people should not need to visit physically. There will be a lot of data generated for all this. Hence, NTP is likely to propose setting up of all servers hosting data of Indian citizens and entities to be kept in local servers by 2022," PTI quoted sources close to the development.

Currently, social media and email companies are using data servers located abroad, even if the message and emails sent within the country.

According to a report draft, NTP will have provision around data sovereignty and stringent framework for data protection in the telecom networks. All ministries are working on their digital program as directed by the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi). Telecom has to be a key enabler of all these processes, and data security is extremely important to support transformation to digital infrastructure.

To recall, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has also issued its recommendations for the National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2018 in which the regulator said that the telecom sector should attract investments of about $100 billion by 2022.

It said that the objective of the NTP 2018 would be to enable access at affordable prices for wireless broadband services, including through satellite to 90 percent population by 2022 and to achieve 900 million broadband subscriptions supporting download speed of 2 Mbps, out of that at least 150 million broadband subscriptions supporting download speed of 20 Mbps and 25 million at a download speed of 50 Mbps by 2022.

According to TRAI's recommendation to the telecom department, a review of telco license fees, spectrum usage charges (SUC), Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF) levy to enhance the overall ease of doing business. Furthermore, the regulator in its recommendations also mentions that the objective of the policy would also be to provide 1Gbps data connectivity to all Gram Panchayats to enable wireless broadband services to inhabitants by 2022.