Rural telephony: Of dismal facts & ambitious picture

Neeraja Kumar

It’s World Telecom Day and the theme this year is Internet challenges and opportunities. But try explaining what that means to Ram Bhan, who lives in a remote UP village and still trudges down 30 miles to the nearest town, every time he needs to call up his son, who has migrated to Delhi. He is not the only one. 70 per cent of India’s population lives in villages, on the promises of water, electricity, and now affordable telephony.

Mr Ram Vilas Paswan is confident of doubling the tele-density from the current level of 3.5 (0.7 in villages) to 7 by the year 2005. He has also promised Village Public Telephones (VPTs) in every village by March 2002. But the facts, don’t match up to the ambitious picture painted by the Minister of Communications. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) met only 34.32 per cent of its rural telephony target for the year 2000-2001. And since 32.7 per cent of the 6,07,491 villages in India, still do not have telephones, it is all set to miss the March 2002 deadline.

And considering that it took BSNL over 50 years to reach the remaining 4 lakh villages, the enormity of the task at hand is astounding. The record of the private basic operators in providing rural telephones is worse still. They met only a dismal 0.44 per cent of their VPT targets as on January 2001.

So the Government zeroed in on a magic mantra to meet its rural telephony targets — limited mobility. But even the private basic operators who are firing shots in the limited mobility battle from the shoulders of rural affordable telephony, also admit there is no business case for it.

So what is it that needs to be done, for Indian villages to get affordable telephony. The most imperative is that the Government faces up to the facts. Rural telephone density is not about providing Rs 1.20 for 3 minute local calls. Rural telephone affordability is about making long distance calls affordable.

Rather than paying lip service to the rural telephony, recognize the fact the villager does not need the phone for making a local calls in the village. What each village needs is a one phone line, a cyber dhaba, and Internet telephony.

If the real objective is rural tele-density, then why not have cyber dhabas in every village and allow Internet telephony to make long distance calls, which are 500 times more affordable than existing rates? Now that might not be good for the 3 lakh employees of BSNL or 58,000 employees of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), but it will benefit everyone else. This is what will drive tele-density.

The second step is to get rid of the mindset that increasing rural tele-density is the objective of only Government operators and fixed service providers (FSPs). Involve all telecom players, instead of creating artificial technology and regulatory barriers.

Speed of roll-out has nothing to do with affordability, it has every thing to do with business case. The Government must recognize that there is no business case for rural telephony and the only way it can be done from the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund. So instead of sitting on the USO, it must expedite it and get rolling with the rural roll-out.

There is a world class cellular infrastructre and service already created throughout the country, which only needs to be interconnected and the entire country will have affordable telephony, which is much lower than BSNL offers. So the Government should allow direct-interconnection to the cellular operators and let them provide affordable long distance services.

World history proves that no one in any country has controlled the market on a long semi-permanent basis. Market, like water, always finds its way to the lowest level of acceptance. Telecom is one sector, where open market dynamics has not occurred due to several reasons. But is is better for the country, better for the industry, better for the regulatory, better for the government and better for the consumers, that we let the consumer chose what he or she wants to chose and pay for.