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Anil Wanwari
So, India is slowly but gradually inching its way onto the internet highway. VSNL, Satyam, Weikfield, MTNL are some of the ISPs who have started offering their services. However, they should take extreme care in offering customer service. When Satyam started touting its service one expected there to be radical amount of difference in service between VSNL and Satyam. Sadly, that was not to be. A query to the Satyam office got a reply from its customer service office after about five hours.
That's a very long lead time in the Internet world. Not only that, the customer service office also did not follow up with this writer when it launched its international roaming service when strict instructions were left with it to do so when it did. The database management of customers and response time has to be definitely spruced up at Satyam's end. Or it may find itself at the receiving end of many irate customers or it may end up losing prospective customers.
Customer service is the key in Internet services; ISP'sin India have to realise this. While customers do look for immediate, continuous and quick access, help with inane queries relating to their software snafus, is something they sorely need advise on. Even in a highly PC-and-Internet-penetrated market like US, ISPs go out of their way to help customers with their "dumb" queries. In a market like India, ISPs will have to do a lot of handholding because computer illiteracy and phobia run very high with the masses. The scene is no different with MTNL. A couple of calls to its free phone evinced no response in terms of an Internet tariff rate card. "It will be faxed to you in a couple of days," was the response. Then why advertise? To test market? Then say so in your ads which tomtom the fact that MTNL is launching its Internet services along with a toll free number.
Don't raise expectations? Sure the ISPs are in a startup mode. They will have their teething troubles. But for the Internet to achieve its rightful place, ISPs will have to be the mentors and guidesof the novices who are hesitantly approaching the World wide web. Apart from being able to handle the questions of the WWW junkies.
The DTH muddle
Over the weekend, the `Save India Society and Society for Advancement of Economic Growth' or some such name held a discussion group in Mumbai. In attendance were some leading names like politician Tushar Gandhi, former mayor Nirmala Prabhavalkar Samant, a retired Mumbai high court judge S S Daud, advocate Sanjeev Kanchan, former minister and journalist Ram Manohar Tripathi, and a management consultant Ramesh Sheth.
The topic of discussion: confluence of media and technology, how far is too far? (Simply translated that means: direct-to-home television should be banned.) And they were simply ill-informed about their topic of discussion. Nor was there any effort on their effort to even understand what the technology is all about. The usual bogeys were raised. DTH is a threat to national security and there is no way to control the technology.
Digs weremade at the information and broadcasting minister Pramod Mahajan's motives behind talking about giving it the go-ahead. "DTH is bad. It is all about cultural imperaliasm. The services will bring pornography and mucky entertainment. And it will try to play up on religious and ethnic differences. It must be banned" "There will be no way for us to bring Rupert Murdoch to book if his IskyB project is given clearance and it violates the law." "Satellite telephony should be given the go-ahead before DTH." "The government should give clearance to a domestic company like Zee TV and even fund it for a DTH service."
The issue here is: several Asian governments - Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and in recent times even China has been testing a DTH service -- have given the go-ahead to DTH with various regulatory restrictions. Are they all fools? Countries such as Malaysia have a stricter broadcasting code than Indians can even imagine. And yet they have given the go-ahead to DTH. DTH by itself is not a harmfultechnology and it can be controlled in various ways. By mandating uplink to government specified satellites from within Indian shores. And the presence of subscriber management systems only on Indian soil. Should there be a violation of any programming and advertising code, the government can very well revoke the uplinking licence. Should the broadcaster continue to uplink from elsewhere, then the government can place a ban on DTH reception equipment like it did a couple of years ago through a notification from the telecom department. It can also impound the subscriber management system and the entire DTH service will fall apart. If it finds it difficult to implement the ban on DTH reception equipment, it can call a state of national emergency and recall decoders from subscriber homes, in the worst case.
But that situation is unlikely to ever come to pass. One cannot expect a player who is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to make a business out of DTH to fool around beyond a point with governmentregulations and codes. It's possible that he may try and influence domestic economic policy or even our culture through programming. But then in a democracy like India, there is already a free flow of influences from both abroad and domestically. A ban on DTH is not at all warranted. What the government should instead strive to do is draw up a good regulatory structure, rules relating to DTH technology and the equipment, programming code, advertising codes, and foreign ownership, public service broadcasting, cross-media holding and channel carriage regulations. It should also draw up strict penalties for violators and rules to prevent the emergence of a monopoly.
Whether the regulations should be part of the Broadcasting Bill or not is an issue that can be debated. It has been gathering dust for the past two years and may continue to gather dust for another two. No government seems to have the guts to touch that hot potato. Hence, the BJP-led government should use the DTH initiative as the starting pointto gradually draw up regulations for the entire broadcasting sector. Go ahead, Mr Mahajan. Not back.
The writer can be reached at wanvari@giasbm01.vsnl.net.in or television@hotmail.com
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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