Advanced
Telecommunication in India:Regulation and Strategy
By Parthasarthi Banerjee
and Sujit Bhattacharya
Har- Anand Publications, New Delhi 1996
Price: Rs. 295/- Pp: 214
The G-7 group terms information technology as "the engine of economic growth today".
So much so that the collapse of the mighty Soviet Union is attributed to the inflexibility of a centralized state in coping with the changes in this technology. Advocates of the free market, therefore, call for the complete privatization and dependence on the market for rapid expansion of the telecommunication infrastructure specially in the underdeveloped world.
In India, the problems of telecommunication infrastructure relate to a number of issues. One is the lack of an even market, it ranges from the very basic POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) user to the advanced user with full ftp, telnet and WWW access. This leads to the problem of bandwidth, which means that the telephone lines are unevenly loaded, and with the traditional primary focus on POTS, the lines are just unable to carry the heavy load of file transfers, remote logging, graphics and video conferencing. To add to the problem, there is the classic unreliability of the telephony services.
When one looks at the rest of the world, specially the developed countries, the situation is altogether at a different level. Things are becoming more interesting by the coming together of the telecom and cable TV operators by the passing of a US bill early this year. This is resulting in mergers and acquisitions, companies like AT&T, MCI and Sprint which are major telecom players in the US are now going to become cable TV operators too ! And what the technological republic of the United States does today, the world does tomorrow. Imagine DOT, the sole service provider in India for so long, being a cable operator too! This would seem to be a fairy tale in a country where the service provider is not even linked to the telecom provider (manufacturer).
With paging and cellular services too increasing at a fantastic rate of 82% for the last 4 years and linking up people across the globe, the ground has become increasingly loaded against the traditionally monopolistic telecom service providers, whether it is Deutsche Telecom, British Telecom, AT&T or our own DOT.
There is no doubt that monopolies- whether state controlled or private- can no longer operate in a diversified market. The customer too now is looking for better and cheaper equipment and services.
The clear answer in India too is privatization of the telecom sector. Its need is compounded by the lack of capital required for the rapid expansion of the telecom infrastructure. But this privatization need not imply a free for all. It has to operate within the framework of regulations, strict and yet flexible. It requires understanding the role of the state in a new light, and upholding the mixed economy model.
Nowhere in the world, least of all in the United States, the labour and effort of the entrepreneur alone has been the sole motivating force. Individual entrepreneure ship has to have the backing of the state power, if only for some duration. Without the Homestead Act, the Whites could have hardly taken over the Wild West, without the tremendous state investments in the military the modern revolution in information technology would not have taken place at all.
In US, the state forcefully supports the large corporations at the expense of the common man. As Noam Chomsky remarks about the "free- market" of the US, "the free market is 'socialism' for the rich: the public pays the costs and the rich get the benefit - markets for the poor and plenty of state protection for the rich". The book touches upon some of the issues regarding the telecom , its outstanding feature is the authors’ emphasis on the role of the proactive state in evolving the regulatory mechanism in tandem with industry and the user community. The examples of US and China are particularly fascinating. Indeed, the National Information Infrastructure and the personal interest shown by the US Vice- President Al Gore in building the information age infrastructure is exemplary- contrast this with the Rasputins and criminals like Sukh Ram who ran the show (sham?) in the heyday of telecom "liberalization".
As the author’s piquantly argue, "the problem of bandwidth in India is not only a problem of the absence of an information infrastructure but also equally the a problem of any strategy for that". There is no effort by our political parties, whether the ruling or the opposition parties, right or left, to understand the dimensions of the problem. In the absence of a backbone, the bandwidth and therefore both the scope and the scale of the information revolution is retarded. The results would be a still slower economic growth, even as compared to our own Asian neighbours. Indeed, debate has to center around issues such as these and in this direction the present book provides a sure start.
However, a few general observations about the book are in order. The authors display a penchant for repeating pet sentences and even paragraphs umpteen times. Though mostly interesting, too much data is presented to the reader, it would have made better sense for the reader to view the data within a general framework of an argument and not as standalone tables. In this sense, the book could have been more "user friendly".
The chapter on the lead users survey is too much of a let down, the survey is at a segmented and superficial level- it could have been carried out to see the impact of the email use on the quality of the papers produced by the "world’s third largest scientific manpower". One desperately would have appreciated much more on the Chinese efforts.
Bhupinder
bhupi@bigfoot.com
The Tribune 03 November 1997
