New Delhi : The comprehensive Convergence Bill 2000 is to be tabled in the winter session of Parliament. Union Minister for Information Technology Pramod Mahajan said at the Ficci-JM Morgan Stanley seminar: "The comprehensive Convergence Bill is almost ready and we will hopefully be able to introduce it in the latter part of the Winter session of Parliament."He also reiterated the Vajpayee government's comitment to `one law, one regulator'. He was speaking at the Ficci-JM Morgan Stanley international conference on `Convergence: The Emerging Reality' which began in the Capital on Wednesday.His key message at the seminar was: Economic and technological issues apart, convergence is about social, cultural and ethical issues. "We have to have new sets of written or unwritten laws for content," he said adding that content was a powerful tool to influence the minds in the years to come.
The conference, which began with the welcome address by Ficci president Mr G P Goenka, which was followed by a theme presentation by Mr John S Wadsworth, chairman, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Asia, had more than a healthy dose of caution and pragmatism.
The first plenary session in the conference on `Key Convergence Trends - How will carriers/channels/technology change?' was chaired by Prasar Bharti CEO RR Shah. And the conclusions were near unanimous: While there might be convergence of networks and delivery systems, device converge for practical purposes is not likely to happen and the customer will truly have the choice to determine what and how he/she want it.
Setting the pace was Mr Crawford Jamieson, executive director, MSDW, Hong Kong, who enunciated MSDW's reports on Asian wireless Internet and B2B scenario in Asia. Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman and managing director, Bharti Enterprises, sounded a word of caution on a single licence issue saying that infrastructure requirements are going to be the key issues in India for the next three years at least. "Internet in the pocket is not likely to become a revolution till prices are more affordable."
Amit Sharma, vice-president, Motorola, however, was more bullish on the future of mobile Internet than the other panel members. "3G has more commercial viability in Asia because most governments have not taken the auction route to licenses," he added.
This was followed by IndusInd Entertainment COO Ashok Mansukhani's presentation who elaborated on the issues of bandwidth.
One of the most insightful presentations of the day was that of Ramesh Venkatraman, partner, Mckinsey & Co. He spoke about the battles occurring in the last mile connectivity and what the situation portends for India.
The session was wrapped up by Discovery managing director Kiran Karnik who pointed out that several emerging trends, which might be technically and commercially feasible, might not actually take off in practice.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.