The new telecom minister Manoj Sinha called for his first meeting with the CEOs of telecom companies today to discuss call drops. The Telecom Commission also met today to take a final call on the spectrum usage charge. The main agenda of the meeting was Digital India and its importance to the government, says Rajan Mathews, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India. The telecom ministry asked the telecom companies to concentrate their efforts at delivering on that front. Also, the telecom minister also highlighted the importance of the consumer, saying affordability and quality of service are very essential.The telecom companies in the meeting stated that there has been a significant reduction in call drop rates and that the industry has come up with new technologies to automate the monitoring of mobile networks.Below is the verbatim transcript of Rajan Matthews’s interview to Prerna Baruah on CNBC-TV18.Q: What was the agenda of the call drop meeting?A: First of all the minister himself has initiated a conversation with the CEOs is very positive. So, the three areas that were mentioned was one, highlighting the fact that Digital India is very important to the government and we need to focus on delivering on that. Second, that the interest of the consumer is very important, the affordability and the quality of the services given there. That is important, he highlighted both of those.The third thing is they have highlighted all the achievements of the department and how the department had met some of the industries issues talking about the 1800 harmonisation issues, spectrum trading issues and then of course he focussed on the fact that listen, call drops is a significant matter and he highlighted that. So, each of the operators went around and highlighted what they were doing. From an industry perspective for example we said we committed to 60,000 base transceiver stations (BTSs) in the next 90 days, we have already met 38,000 optimisation of our networks over 100,000, we have met over 50 percent of that. So, significant progress, significant investments, significant reduction already in the call drops just about everywhere except in the key hotspot area. Lutyens' Delhi continues to be a problem, South Delhi continues to be a problem, Cantonment areas continue to be a problem. But the good thing is that both the minister and the secretary said we are going to try and help the industry in these particular areas.Q: But in the last meeting with the telecom secretary the telcos did assure that they will step up their investments further to deploy it wherever required to set up more towers. Has that been done and also you all did submit a 100 day action plan. So, what is the update on that?A: That is what we talked about. We said that we would put 60,000 BTSs, we have already put up 38,000, over a 100,000 cell towers that would be optimised, over 50 percent of that met that we would be introducing new technology to automate the process of monitoring our networks already done, all the various technologies have been put in place, improved drive test technologies and methodologies, that has been done. We are monitoring our cell towers on a cell tower basis, not just on an LSA basis, done. So, that is significant, the amount of progress that has been made and the minister has appreciated what has been done by the industry.