Anshu Prakash wins Voice&Data Telecom Person of the Year Award 2021, at TLF

The winner for The Voice&Data Jury award for the category- Telecom Person of the Year, 2021 was conferred onto Mr. Anshu Prakash, retired Secretary, Telecom & Chairman of Digital Communication Commission. The award was given to Mr. Anshu Prakash at the 21^st Voice&Data Telecom Conference, held on March 22, 2022.  Mr. Prakash was nominated for the award by a 10 member Jury that met on January 27, 2022, to deliberate on the nominees.

Mr. Prakash holds an exemplary record as a civil servant, a career bureaucrat, and as one of the ablest administrators in the country – cutting across industry sectors. He has served the Government of India in various capacities for over 35 long years.

On 18^th of November 2018, Anshu Prakash took over as Secretary, Telecom, and Chairman of the Digital Communications Commission (DCC), just as the Cabinet approved the National Digital Communication Policy (NDCP) of 2018. Thereafter he unrolled a series of Policy reforms that will change Indian Telecom in the near future

Mr Prakash is a BA in Economics from St. Stephens College and has a management degree from the Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) Delhi University.

He joined the IAS as an officer of the Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram Union Territories (or AGMUT) cadre.

In 2018, Mr Prakash had an unenviable task as the mobile sector was grappling with a range of licensing and financial issues.

Following the grand vision of the NDCP – to support India’s transition into a digitally empowered economy and society -- Mr. Prakash, focused on creating an enabling environment that would establish resilient and affordable digital communications infrastructure. This framework would rely on advanced technologies such as 5G, IOT, M2M, AI and other emerging technologies.

Mobile Broadband and Internet sectors are the foundations for our $1 trillion digital economy.

Mr. Anshu Prakash initiated a series of policy measures that brought a breath of fresh air into the sector and served to resolve the thorniest problems. Among them:

• Easing the rules for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the sector
• Improving the Spectrum sharing framework among telecom operators
• Facilitating a solution to the acute issue of pending license fee dues to the Government based on Adjusted Gross Revenues (AGR)
• The accumulated burden on the sector was enormous and threatened to derail the sector entirely.

Mr Prakash helped develop a framework that would finally result in a landmark policy decision. The AGR policy has given Operators breathing room to continue investing and growing.

It is probably one of the biggest and most far-reaching Policy decisions taken by the Government under his leadership that has set the sector back on track.

Mr. Prakash also spent enormous time and efforts to create the other path-breaking and supporting Policy framework that gave India’s local manufacturing ecosystem a renewed focus.

His guidance to refine the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) and Aatma Nirbhar policies of the Government are yielding spectacular results – and are now being replicated across other sectors. These initial decisions would facilitate transforming India into a manufacturing hub in the coming months.

For these untiring and very sensitive balancing acts in Policy Making, and for his tremendous efforts in reviving the Telecom sector, Voice & Data is honored and privileged to confer on Mr. Anshu Prakash the Telecom Person of the year, 2021 award.