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National Development “TRAI was established to regulate, oversee, and promote competition and growth in telecom.” rights of way and telephone numbering plans. However, this body was tainted from the start: not only was it rather weak in the powers conferred on it by the TRAI Act, it was also largely staffed by officers on short-term deputation from the DOT family — the very organisations it was meant to oversee. Yet, so blatant was DOTs intention to rule the roost, that TRAI very quickly got into a turf battle with the DOT and MTNL. It stopped a DOT bid to cash in the bank guarantees of six cellular operators who had not paid licence fees, and in 1998, it prevented MTNL from entering the cellular market and ruled DOTs Internet policy invalid. The government operators took the matters to the Delhi High Court, which ruled later that year that the regulator did not have jurisdiction over the DOTs licensing powers, and threw open private entry into Internet services. The government attempted to clarify the TRAIs function, but after the High Court judgement, the TRAI was left with a single thankless task, setting tariffs. various political stratagems to block it. Finally, in 2000, the government disbanded the TRAI and appointed a new body in its place, which it divested of judicial powers. These were handed over to a telecom disputes settlement and appellate tribunal. This was followed by a spate of improvements in the competitive environment. National and international long distance services were opened up to competition in 2002, and the license conditions for basic services improved. The Tatas and Reliance came in with major investment after this, based on CDMA technology. There was a bitter dispute with cellular telephony providers, who felt that basic services providers were able to offer more or less an equivalent service, at far better licence conditions and lengthy litigation followed. Finally, towards the end of 2003, a unified licence was introduced, and the dispute finally laid to rest. As a consequence, "From a single operator and the lowest tele-density in the world we now have multiple operators, several technologies, at least 30 pre and post-paid tariff packages, not less than 300 models of handsets cellular tariffs dropped by over 90 per cent since May 1999, a feat unparalleled by any other sector or industry." India had 14.17 million mobile phone subscribers at the end of May 2003, 102.8 per cent more than at the end of the same month in 2002. The number of mobile phone users is expected to surge to 120 million by 2008, making the sector one of the hottest markets for global telecom majors facing low demand in Western countries. www.connect-world.com Visit the decision makers’ forum for ICT driven development on line. Here you can preview past issues, upcoming events and contributing author’s from across the globe. Subscribe to receive Connect World Highlights, a fortnightly on line news letter to keep you up to date with the latest happenings in the ICT world. Figure 2: A unified licence was finally introduced in 2003. Here too, it met controversy every step of the way. It had court battles with MTNL on tariff issues pertaining to its mobile phone service, and when it tried to reduce the subsidy that long-distance services were providing to local traffic, the DOT used Visit Connect-World at www.connect-world.com 20
National Development Networking Indias Interior by Venkat Kedlaya, Managing Director, Convergent Communications, India The interior of India, as in remote regions throughout the world, is far behind the countrys urban areas in the use of ICTs. Many government programmes, often in cooperation with NGOs and private interests, are working to bridge this gap. Information kiosks, where the rural population can access the Internet, for governmental, healthcare, educational, financial and other services have been successful. Building the infrastructure, providing wireless connectivity, developing local language content and applications and making it affordable have been a challenge. Venkat Kedlaya is the Managing Director of Convergent Communications India Pvt. Ltd, located in Bangalore, India. Before joining Convergent, Mr Kedlaya served as the General Manager of Motorola Information Systems Groups Networking division in South Asia and as Director of Motorolas transmission products group in Hong Kong. Previously, Mr Kedlaya worked as the Product Engineering Manager at Modi Xerox, as a Project manager with Rank Xerox UK, as Project manager with International Power Semiconductors and as project engineer at the Radar Project Centre in Mumbai. Venkat Kedlaya currently heads the Southern Region Committee of MAIT, an IT industry organisation in India. Mr Kedlaya earned his MSc in electronics and M Tech in Electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, completed the management programme at Ashridge College in England and attended the Centre for Creative Leadership at Greensboro US. It is a fact that Information Technology (IT) is playing an important role in all issues concerning human life, be it social, economic or political. Today, IT does not effectively exist without the network, and ICT—Information Communication Technology—is a better description. India can be divided into urban, semiurban and rural areas. Urban areas are the metropolitan cosmopolitan cities and state capitals. Semi-urban areas are the towns at district headquarters. Rural areas are the villages in a district. In urban areas of India, ICT, the connectivity infrastructure for backhaul and access, Internet reach, applications and services are growing fast. The presence of multiple telecom, mobile, and Internet service providers has brought enormous benefits to the urban community, contributed to the urban life style and to industrial efficiency and is helping meet the growing needs of society. In the interior, though, the communication infrastructure and Internet reach is poor, not at all comparable to urban areas. This has created a digital divide between urban and rural India. The digital divide also implies educational, health, income, and opportunity divides. Networking Indias interior There have been many initiatives in recent past to bridge the divide in different pockets of the country including: ˆ eSeva, Integrated Citizen Services, in Andhra Pradesh; ˆ Lok Mitra and Jan Mitra Projects from Rajasthan; ˆ e-BillPost and e- Post Services of the Department of Posts; ˆ RASI (Rural Access to Services through the Internet) earlier called SARI and n- Logue Communications; ˆ Gyandoot—Rural Intranet project— Madhyapradesh; ˆ Community Information Centres (CIC) Project (Dept. of Info Tech., Govt.of India) in North Eastern region; ˆ Bhoomi —Land Record Digitisation project—Karnataka; ˆ ITC eChoupal — project by ITCs international business division, to establish efficient agricultural supply chain; ˆ Kuppam i- community, project by Hewlett Packard, Andhra Pradesh, The technology incubator and hub at 21
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