Ram Sewak Sharma


Ram Sewak Sharma is an Indian bureaucrat. He has been the Chairman of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India since 10th of August 2015. Prior to this assignment, he swore as the Secretary of Department of Electronics and Information Technology. He belongs to the 1978 batch of the Indian Administrative Service.

Early life

Born in a small village of Uttar Pradesh, he completed his early education from schools near his village. He joined University of Allahabad from where he earned his Bachelor of Science. He completed his masters in Mathematics from IIT, Kanpur, in 1978.
While on leave from the Government of India, he earned a Masters in Computer Science from University of California, Riverside in 2002 and subsequently a PhD from IIT, Delhi.

Career

Ram Sewak Sharma joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1978.
In 1986, he wrote a program in DBASE, a programming language that would keep a record of all stolen firearms in the crime-prone district. As soon as a firearm would be found, the programme would run a search query among thousands of age-old records. Together, they impressed the state government, by solving 22 cases in just 30 days. This was an early indicator of his preference for using computer in governance.
As Chairman of TRAI, he steered the adoption of net neutrality regulations in India. He has taken measures to enable consumer choice in determining market outcomes, e.g. a new framework for broadcasting and cable services, regulations for mobile number portability, and the use of crowd-sourced information or field measurements to inform customers
He has been alive to the emerging issues and opportunities. For example, he supported the adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology in fighting spam and TRAI gave recommendations to the Government of India on Privacy, Security and Ownership of the Data in the Telecom Sector and Spectrum, Roaming and QoS related requirements in Machine-to-Machine Communications
As the TRAI chairman, his goal to gradually reduce has earned him much acclaim from some and criticism from others. Critics allege that the decision is biased towards Jio while those defending TRAI claim that reducing these charges was necessary for the continuous growth of the sector.

Awards