A body created to be the brain of indian telecom has spent the better part of a decade functioning as its appendix — present, occasionally inflamed, and largely unnecessary. According to Mint, the Modi government is now considering what surgeons and frustrated bureaucrats have long recommended: removing it entirely.

The wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW">digital Communications Commission (DCC) — born in 1997 as the Telecom Commission, rechristened in 2018 with a name befitting the wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW">digital age — was designed as the supreme executive body for telecom policy. It was supposed to cut through India's legendary red tape, fast-tracking decisions on spectrum allocation, licensing, and infrastructure. For a while, that was the sales pitch. The reality, as multiple government sources have indicated to Mint, is a body that became the very bottleneck it was built to prevent.

Neither the Department of Telecommunications nor MeitY had responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

The Turf war That Froze Telecom Policy

To understand why the DCC may be headed for the morgue, you need to understand the quiet, grinding war between India's two digital-age ministries: DoT and MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology). On paper, the boundary is clean — DoT handles telecom pipes, MeitY handles the data that flows through them. In practice, every significant policy question of the last five years — OTT regulation, data localisation, satellite broadband licensing, AI-driven network management — has fallen in the grey zone between the two. And the DCC, which was supposed to be the decisive authority, became, according to Mint's sources, the arena where these turf wars played out rather than where they got resolved.

Consider spectrum. India's 5g spectrum auctions were delayed multiple times over the last few policy cycles. While the headline reasons varied — pandemic disruptions, pricing disagreements with industry — industry observers cited by Mint point to a less-publicised bottleneck: the DCC clearance process itself. According to these observers, proposals that should have taken weeks to clear often languished for months because the Commission's composition — which included secretaries from multiple ministries — turned routine approvals into inter-ministerial negotiations. Every meeting became a miniature cabinet session, minus the political will to break deadlocks.

The 5G-Advanced and Satcom Stall

The cost of this paralysis is not abstract. india is now in the thick of 5G-Advanced deployment — the evolutionary step between 5g and 6G that enables network slicing, ultra-reliable low-latency communication, and the kind of industrial IoT applications that the government's own Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes — worth ₹1.97 lakh crore across sectors, according to the

The numbers tell the story with brutal economy. India's telecom sector attracted approximately $2.67 billion in FDI in FY2024, according to data published by the Department for Promotion of industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT FDI statistics, annual report) — respectable, but a fraction of the potential in a market with over 1.2 billion mobile subscribers. industry bodies like the Cellular Operators Association of india (COAI) have repeatedly pointed to regulatory uncertainty and clearance delays — not market fundamentals — as the primary drag on investment acceleration. In a june 2024 submission, COAI urged the government to streamline multi-ministry clearance processes, noting that the current framework "creates avoidable delays in spectrum and licensing decisions."

wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW">digital infrastructure — broadband penetration in rural constituencies, affordable data for the next 300 million smartphone users, 5g coverage that works outside metro cores — is no longer a technocratic talking point. It is an electoral deliverable. The BharatNet programme, designed to connect approximately 2.5 lakh gram panchayats with fibre optic broadband — a target set by the DoT in its official project documentation — has been repeatedly delayed and restructured. The DCC's layered clearance process has been, according to Mint's sources, one of several bureaucratic chokepoints for BharatNet's final-mile approvals. Winding up the Commission and consolidating decision-making directly within DoT's secretary-level apparatus would give the Prime Minister's office a cleaner, faster chain of command — and, critically, a more direct mechanism to ensure that rural broadband targets are met before voters go to polls.

There is a factional element too, in our reading. Within the BJP's own governance philosophy since 2014, the trend has been unmistakable: concentrate decision-making, reduce the number of veto players, and ensure that the PMO has a direct line to execution. The DCC's multi-ministry composition made it, in effect, a consensus body in a government that prizes speed over consensus. Its abolition would be entirely consistent with the Modi administration's centralisation playbook — the same logic that subsumed the Planning Commission into NITI Aayog, merged rail and general budgets, and collapsed multiple labour laws into four codes.

What Replaces It? The $2.67 Billion Question

Mint's reporting suggests the functions currently under the DCC would be absorbed directly by the DoT, with the Telecom Secretary wielding executive authority that currently requires full Commission clearance. This is not a cosmetic reshuffle. It means spectrum pricing recommendations, satellite licensing frameworks, and 5G-Advanced rollout timelines could, in theory, be greenlit by a single officer rather than a panel of secretaries from competing ministries.

The risk is obvious and worth stating plainly: concentrating this power also concentrates the potential for regulatory capture. When a single department controls both policy formulation and execution for a sector worth over ₹3 lakh crore in annual revenue — a figure derived from TRAI's annual Indian Telecom

A TRAI spokesperson did not respond to india Herald's queries on whether the regulator had taken a formal position on the proposed restructuring.

Primary source: Mint report (June 2025), 'Govt may wind up wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW">digital Communications Commission to end work overlaps, policy delays.' Additional data sourced from DPIIT FDI statistics (FY2024), TRAI Performance Indicator Reports, press Information Bureau PLI scheme documentation, and DoT BharatNet project records.