India’s leap into information age

Today is World Telecom and Information Society Day

The most people -benefiting outcome of economic liberalisation initiated by late P V Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister is telecom revolution. From long-waiting periods of up to 10 years, high prices and poor services till the late 1990s, the telephone now is in everybody’s hand solely because of the end of government monopoly over production of equipment and provision of services.

When the National Telecom Policy (NTP) was first adopted in 1994, India had 10 million telephones i.e., a teledensity of one phone for 100 people. Price for a year’s service averaged Rs 10,000 which was equal to the then per capita income of Rs 10,000. Today, we have 118 crore telephones, a teledensity of 87 phones for hundred people, and 90% of them are mobile phones.

The average cost of having a year’s mobile phone service at Rs 3,000 is 1/33rd of our per capita income of Rs 1,00,000 per year. At Rs 250 per month, a month’s telephone service can be had for less than the daily wages of an unskilled mazdoor.

That is the reason why we have the phenomenon of “haath haath mein telephone,” a slogan I raised and worked for as the Chief General Manager of Telecoms in Andhra Pradesh and as the Deputy Director General of the Department of Telecoms and, finally, as the Chairman & Managing Director of the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd.

It is not only telephones that we are having in abundance and affordably; we also have Internet, the repository of all information and knowledge that is being created anywhere in the world, any time. Of the 750 crore population of the world, already over 60% of them are having access to the Internet. In our country, over 25% of our population are accessing the Internet and most of them through the mobile phone.

There is revolution even in the mobile phone device, it is multi-functional. Formerly it weighed 500 grams; it is now about 80 grams. It includes a camera, radio, huge memory and computational power. Soon it will supersede the PC itself that is why today we find people asking to send SMS and not e-mail. The SMS can be read anytime, anywhere in the world; while flying in the skies, riding on roads, sailing on seas. It is becoming smaller, more powerful, longer lasting, more processing and most importantly, ever cheaper just like the telephone service itself.

All this revolution in our country is part of the liberalisation of the economy and unleashing of the entrepreneurial and business spirit of our people. That was what P V Narasimha Rao wanted to unleash, entrepreneurship and an Indian vision that were caged by the sickening constraint of ill-conceived and bureaucratically implemented socialism.

We see the country with lakhs of cell towers. Just as electricity to our homes is not possible without the lamp posts that carry electrical wires and the electric substations, mobile telephony is not possible without numerous cell towers and the base stations.

I am not a little sorry that ill-informed and misguided people go on objecting to the presence of cell towers. In fact, we need more and more cell towers for better and more reliable service at higher speeds without calls dropping in some areas.

Competition in the telecom sector in our country is most intense; in fact, it is hyper-competition. While most countries are having no more than three telcos holding about 90% of the market, our country has nearly a dozen telcos. No doubt, intense competition between 2008 and 2010 saw the spectacular phenomenon of 18 million telephones being added per month.

The hyper competition, especially with the entry of the resourceful R-Jio is causing concern in the market. Prices have come down. Incumbent telcos are making losses. Non R-Jio telcos are having a debt of Rs 3,50,000 crores. Banks have downgraded telcos for credit and loans. Telcos are asking for deferred payments due to government.

Information is power. The old telecom system has been transformed into an electronic- photonic transportation system for transmission and storage and distribution of electronified information as in telephony , in video i.e pictures; text (i.e script) and data.

The spread of the mobile communication network and our ability to access the millions of websites, which are storehouses of information, and data in electronic form is bringing a revolution in the way we learn, we work, we socialise, we govern and change the government itself.

Humanity has long ago crossed the agricultural stage, had gone through the industrial stage; now we are entering an information or knowledge age, in which people communicate for work and commute for pleasure, as envisioned by the telecom visionaries working in the famed Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, United States.

India conceived the project initially called NOFN (National Optical Fibre Network) to extend broadband ( 10MBPS and above) connectivity to the 2,50,000 village panchayats and through them all the over 6,00,000 villages. It was going slow; the NDA government got it relooked, terms its Digital India and has given freedom to State governments to implement it in the most cost-effective way but to national standards.

AP has taken the lead; its cost is a fraction of what it would have been, had it been left to central PSUs. All Digital India projects are funded from the government’s Universal Service Fund (total accumulation so far Rs 70,000 crore at 5% levy on telcos’ revenues) India has taken to telecom and information technology in a spectacular way. The world’s largest store of electronified information is here in India in the form of Aadhaar.

Now that we are progressing towards a digital and an information society, the accumulation of huge data and its mining and analysis and use for good governance, better economy and education; everything better is becoming possible. Linking the Aadhaar and the permanent account number (PAN) for income tax and the voter identity card will profoundly impact our life, work, economy and culture.

India is becoming a repository and producer of a large number of engineers, especially in the ICT areas. We need to improve the quality of our education and the quality of our professionals. This is a continuous process. Our governments are taking many facilitative measures to make India, Hyderabad and some other cities in the country the preferred destinations for location of knowledge-based businesses.

Hyderabad city is already home to about 4,00,000 ICT professionals and about three times more persons are engaged in supportive and facilitative services. Their tribe should increase. (Writer is former Information Technology Advisor, Government of Andhra Pradesh and former CMD, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd)

By Dr T H Chowdar