Gearing up for an Opposition attack over FDI during the upcoming Parliament session, the government on Friday asserted that it was ready to face any situation, including a no-confidence motion, even as it was reaching out to political parties to ensure passage of key bills
To stop the menace of pesky messages, telecom regulator Trai on Monday said only 100 SMSes in a day per SIM card will be allowed at concessional rates. For every SMS beyond the cap of 100 SMSes, a charge of minimum 50 paise will be applicable.
The Trai recently issued a consultation paper to seek public views to strengthen regulations to check pesky calls and SMSes.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday contested the claims of former Telecom Secretary Siddhartha Behura over a December, 2007, meeting held regarding entry fees for 2G licences, in which he had said the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram and former Finance Secretary D Subbarao were present.
Kapil Sibal said the operators need to change their mindset by moving away from voice services to data.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Friday said the mobile phone operators must move from voice-based revenue model and customers should gradually be charged only for data services and not for making calls.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Sunday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of buckling under the pressure exerted by Narendra Modi by including him in the party's top decision-making Parliamentary Board, and said the Gujarat chief minister will someday pose a challenge to his own party.
Emphasising on the need for self-regulation on sharing information on the Internet, Sibal said that media needs to realise its role in sharing news, which should 'empower' people and not cause 'disruption'.
While Baba Ramdev walks the red carpet laid out by the government, we ask you our readers for your views on the issue.
Rejecting Finance Minister P Chidambaram's zero-loss theory in coal allocation scam because no mining was done, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday said his view was akin to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal's repudiation of CAG's estimation of presumptive loss in allocation of 2G spectrum.
After the furore over his statement on content monitoring on Internet, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Friday said the government has no intention of 'interfering' with the social media, nor does its plan to evolve guidelines amounting to restriction or regulation.
He said the industry should develop a set of guidelines for screening of objectionable content after it is uploaded.
We had asked our readers for their opinion about the government's attempts to censor online content. An overwhelming number of readers condemned such a move and suggested that Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal and his colleagues should focus on more important issues instead:
Government wants social-networking websites to pre-screen content.
Government wants social-networking websites to pre-screen content.
In a letter to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal, Tata Communications chairman Subodh Bhargave gave a summary of the sequences of events since 2005, which also have concurrence of two directors nominated by the government.
The second round of spectrum auction will begin in March after the Cabinet decides on reducing reserve price of 800 MHz band, used for offering CDMA-based mobile services.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal brought the government into another stand-off with the Bhartiya Janata Party, accusing it of stalling Parliament in the winter session to prevent the cover up the National Democratic Alliance regime's lapses.
Get acquainted yourself with the bells and whistles that India's cheapest tablet comes with at just Rs 1,730.
The Finance Ministry, which is under immense pressure to meet the fiscal deficit target during the current financial year, has also written a letter to the department of telecommunication to auction spectrum to earn additional revenues.
Replying to supplementaries during Question Hour in Rajya Sabha, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said there are 154,688 post offices in the country, the largest postal network in the world.
"Too many scams are left unpunished. In the last 10 years, there have been some highly sophisticated economic crimes. There is an unfortunate belief that smooth talking the media and using complicated words can get them to bury the truth. I had to examine over 1,600 documents with complicated words just to come up with a simple 41-slides presentation. That is how things have become," Chandrasekhar told rediff.com after a presentation he made in the capital on Friday.
Arun Jaitley, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, takes on the government, especially Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal and Home Minister P Chidambaram.
The tablet will be produced domestically, and in this regard the government is talking to various manufacturers from across the world.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal asked private telecom operators to replicate the success story of telecom revolution -- witnessed in urban India-- in rural areas as well.
Earlier, the Telecom Commission, a decision-making arm of the Telecom Ministry, had recommended that the government pick up a majority stake in the special purpose vehicle created to execute the sale of surplus land lying with VSNL (now Tata Communications).
On day when A Raja, jailed former minister of telecommunications, accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former finance minister P Chidambaram in a lower court while trying to drag them 'legally' in the 2G spectrum scam, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal also picked up none else but Raja's lawyer's argument.
Civil society members of the joint committee on Lokpal will seek a referendum on the points of difference with government representatives including the issue of bringing the prime minister and the higher judiciary under the ambit of the anti-graft ombudsman.
Mobile phone firms are willing to let go of inactive subscribers because holding on to them doesn't help in any way in the new order.
The Supreme Court on Monday refrained from passing any order on a PIL filed against Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal accusing him of reducing a penalty amount favouring Anil Ambani-headed Reliance Communications, saying persons aggrieved can avail remedy under the law.
At present, GSM operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular earn 10-12 per cent of their revenues from the national roaming services, which amount to Rs 10,000-Rs 13,500 crore.
The charge against Sibal is that, in February 2011, he reduced the penalty on RCom for violation of the United Access Service Licences agreement from Rs 50 crore to Rs 5 crore (Rs 50 million) per telecom circle.
Amid growing consumer dissatisfaction, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal will hold the first round table with consumer user groups to look into their grievances in issues like pesky calls, hidden costs in tariffs and ineffective redressal system, among others.
After banning telecom equipment from Chinese manufacturers like Huawei suspecting spy software embedded in the gadgets, India has now appointed Huawei to filter imported equipment for malicious software.
The porn clip controversy in Karnataka Assembly led Union Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal to take a dig at the Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday saying the party is having "all the entertainment".
The Communist Party of India-Marxist on Thursday said that the Supreme Court order cancelling the 2G spectrum licences is a "strong indictment" of the government and asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take a call on its fallout as it has exposed the "bluff" on the UPA-II's claims.
Followers of activist Anna Hazare on Tuesday declared that they didn't want a confrontation with the Delhi police, in an apparent reaction to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal's strong statement against the "abusive language" allegedly used by the activists.No defiance of prohibitory orders, no courting arrest by insisting on a fast at Jantar Mantar and no boycott of the joint committee the government formed at the insistence of Hazare to draft the Lokpal Bill, the group decided.
A Group of Ministers headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukhejree is likely to meet on Monday to vet London-listed mining group Vedanta Resources' $ 9.6 billion acquisition of Cairn India.
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