Clarion call

Competition brings cheer to consumers

Telephone subscribers are celebrating. If basic operators have honeycombed to slash Subscriber Trunk Dialling rates by 50 per cent effective January 26, the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited has gone a step further by announcing that STD rates will be pruned by as much as 62 per cent, beginning January 14. In either case, the subscriber stands to gain — take, for instance, an STD call from Delhi to Mumbai that costs a maximum of Rs 24 per minute now. Come January 14, expect to pay Rs 9 for that! If additional cheers are needed, listen up to what minister of state for communications, Tapan Sikdar, had to say on Thursday. The government is set to slash international call rates by April. And that’s not all. Tariff rationalisation is in evidence too, with BSNL doing away with the clumsy five-slab tariff mechanism and introducing two simple slabs of peak hours and non-peak hours, instead.

This bonanza can be directly attributed to the entry of private players in the arena of domestic long distance services, in itself a signal of the government’s willingness to usher in an era of interconnectivity. Though long overdue, this facility will allow customers of one network to talk to customers of another network, without the bother of routing domestic calls through BSNL or international calls through Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited. Happily, the ongoing telecom tariff tit-for-tat will only hot up as monopolies crumble, more private players enter the fray, and technology changes rapidly. Telephone users can, therefore, look forward to a regime of progressively reducing tariff rates. With services becoming more affordable, the number of subscribers is bound to swell, with a positive bearing on teledensity, currently under 4 phones for 100 people. Some 1.95 lakh villages still remain unwired, a situation which the government wants to amend by the end of the year. That may well be possible. Initial growth was certainly unspectacular but the last five years have seen the telecom sector grow at a phenomenal pace. Stay on line — it will only get better.