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India has attained national telephone subscriber base of 100 million people, roughly nine per cent of the population. Only five years back, the country had just 28 million telephone subscribers. Today India’s telephone network of over 100 million subscribers is one of the largest in the world and second largest among the emerging economies, after China’.
The last 20 years have witnessed dramatic changes in the global communication scene. It started with the recognition that telecommunication is not only a major contributor to the GDP, but is also a major factor in removing poverty. In fact, the poor need telephone even more than the rich do. Experience across the world has demonstrated that telecommunication helps the poor to access information critical to them. It also helps them to magnify their little and remote voices of protest against injustice and denial and reach it all the way to the authorities both nationally and globally. At that level telecommunication develops a social and political dimension, helping the economically disadvantaged to assert themselves and to push for transformation of the political and economic structures in their favour.
In our country, we had the well-known Kittur experiment in the 1980s. In a village with a population of just 12,500 people in Karnataka the installation of an STD system of 128 lines in 1986 of the Indian designed and made rural automatic exchange led to a dramatic change in the lives of the people, mostly farmers. The 74 subscribers made an amazing number of 2400 calls per subscriber per year. It led to an increase of 80 per cent in cash deposits in the local bank branches, an increase of 20 to 30 per cent in local business incomes and more rapid access to doctors for the local residents in case of emergencies. Among the many benefits the telephone connection that put the farmers in touch with the markets far away, was a significant rise in the prices they could gain for their produce. Now they could call up and find out what the prevailing price was whether in Bangalore or Mumbai instead of quietly accepting the price the middlemen dictated.
Since then, in myriad experiments with village telephone and info-centres the experience of Kittur has been confirmed and reconfirmed. NLog, a rural communication entity floated by some IIT professors in Chennai under Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala’s leadership has established over 100 rural info centres where villagers are able to be in day-to-day touch with markets on prices of their products and of their farming inputs. These centres also help the local people contact doctors in cities or get help from veterinary doctors for their cattle. Besides, these info-centres put them in touch with government offices in district or state headquarters. Right in their villages they are able to download government forms, get information on their applications or enquire about college admissions and exam results. Some even get their astro predictions from these centres. The local people trained for this purpose operate them. The small fees these centres charge for the various services helps the owner make a decent income. It is a win-win situation for the local people, the local entrepreneur and the nation.
The simple stand-alone telephone over the last two decades has become an information dissemination device instead of a mere voice communication instrument. This transformation from voice communication to information dissemination reflects the convergence of information and communication technologies. This is a significant development of the Information Age. An equally important development in these two decades has been the emergence of the wireless connectivity. Globally, there are more wireless telephones than wired ones. As against 1.2 billion wired telephone lines there are 1.5 billion wireless mobile phones in use globally. In our country too, the number of mobile subscribers became more than the number of landline subscribers last year itself. As of December 2004, there were 44.8 million fixed phones but the mobile phones at 48 million had left the conventional instrument far behind. The trend has continued. By March-end last year there were over 50 million mobile phones their number is growing at the rate of 1.7 million every month.
Mobile telephony has a positive and significant impact on economic growth. This impact may be twice as large in the developing countries as against the developed ones. An increase of ten mobile phone subscriptions per 100 people boosts the GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. In our country the number of mobile phones in use almost doubled from about 33 million to 54 million in 2004-05. Across the globe the demand for mobile phones has increased in proportion much more than the increase in incomes or reduction in prices.
Our policy makers have therefore rightly made affordability of communication tools a major factor in shaping their policy. More so of wireless communication. A local call on a cellular mobile in March 2003 used to cost Rs. 1.63 for a subscriber of the BSNL/MTNL services. In September 2004 it was down to just 77 paise on the WLL system, the price went down from 71 paise to 44 paise. For STD, the charges today are a fraction of what they were earlier. For distances above 1000km, the STD charges have come down from Rs. 30 per minute in 1999 to Rs. 2.40 last year. The ISD charges have also gone down by over 60 per cent. Distances are becoming less and less important in tariff fixation in telecommunication.
“There is every reason to believe that the economic and social returns to mobile will be the highest of all in rural areas,” says the Minister of Information Technology and Communications Shri Dayanidhi Maran. Accordingly, the Government policy has been to promote the convergence of Information Technology and Communications on one hand and to make the access to the converged platform as affordable as it could possibly be.
The rural thrust would thus be to extend broadband connectivity as far as possible. Over one lakh tele-info centres are proposed for the rural areas besides a whole lot of concessions to take telephony or rather rural broadband telephony to the villages. Broadband enables the user to receive voice, data and video over a single wire or wireless channel to one or multiple terminals, telephone, TV and PC as the user may prefer. Besides, in the private sector business houses like ITC through its e-Chaupal initiative are spreading Internet-based connectivity in the countryside. NGOs like nLog and Dr. M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation are also working in this area. The Government has a Rs. 3,300 crore programme to take data connectivity to all block headquarters. From there niche operators could take it to the villages.
Pro-active government policies are bound to provide the lowest cost Broadband services to our villages; in South Korea, for instance, low cost broadband driven by government policies, has made that country a world leader in this area. In India low cost broadband is specifically targeted to bring distance education, telemedicine and e-governance to the doors of our six lakh villages.
**May 17 is World Telecommunication Day
*Journalist
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