Telecommunications

January 22, 2007
Kalam stresses on providing amenities in rural India

Runa Mukherjee

NEW DELHI -- N. Srinivasan ushered in the India Telecom 2006 event by welcoming the chief guests, Thiru Dayanidhi Maran, and APJ Abdul Kalam, president of India. Praising Maran for leading from the front, he said the event was a success only because of the support and spirit of our Minister of IT.

While bemoaning the state of the country's infrastructure, Srinivas pointed out that India's tele-density has touched 18 percent this year and the telecom sector alone is contributing to over one percent increase in the GDP growth every year.

“This is because of the fact that telecom is not only linking the IT and BPO sectors but also becoming a strong factor in providing a link between the poorer sections and communities of the country,” he said.

Maran, on his behalf called this as the most favourable time to hold this event.

“Be it the subscriber growth, the reduction in license fees, the entry of manufacturing units, the One Rupee calls or the amendment of the Indian Telegraph Act, all these have put India on the growth trajectory,” he said.

Every second, a new customer is added in the GSM base and currently, we have crossed the 100 million mark. Reduction in license fees from a 15 percent to only six percent today in NLD also speaks a lot about the growth we have acquired in such a short span. “The keyword is 'equity and sustainability' as it is very important for a country like India that we are able to take technology to the masses,” said Maran.

Speaking about rural telephony, Maran said that telecom access to rural areas would be the most revolutionary change after the Green Revolution. Terming the year 2007 as the ‘Year of Broadband’, Maran said, “We expect public and private companies to come together. For MTNL, we have a target of nearly five million broadband connections to trigger the broadband revolution.”

There are some essentials to further the telecom growth in the country, some as cited by the Union Minister is as below:

• Large scale utilisation of local language will enable deep penetration;
• Copper cables that earlier carried kilobits can now carry megabits and even terabits;
• Bandwidth has grown abundant and distance has faded. It is a known fact that the more educated a person is, the lesser bandwidth is used;
• Convergence in smart devices is the need of the hour;
• As data traffic will soon outdo voice traffic, India must leapfrog to the most cost efficient technology.

“Nearly one billion people in a democratic country being connected is a challenge,” he said. But having a very strong and mature agricultural base gives us a good footing.

Another topic that was touched upon by the Union minister was societal transformation. “A knowledge society will be highly networked to efficiently create, share knowledge and fully gear the participants in societal transformation with a knowledge component.”

During this year itself, several telecom giants have set up their manufacturing units here like Flextronics, Nokia, etc. Competition at a high level has begun, as the digits speak for themselves, i.e. 180 million phone subscribers and 140 million cell phone subscribers in the country as of now.

The chief guest of the ceremony, president APJ Abdul Kalam, had a serious message for the telecom operators present at the event, “Providing urban amenities in rural India”.

He said, “I use technology all the time. I have a multimedia studio at Rashtrapati Bhawan that helps me to access any classroom in the country, be it in a city or in a far off village. It is possible today because of the advances in technology that the country has made. Almost 700 million people are living in the 600,000 villages. The technological challenge is therefore to bring connectivity to billion people.”

He further told his audience that when telecom giants come to meet him, he tells them in clear terms that if they plan to do business in India, they should stop looking at small urban profits and look at the huge rural profits that lay untapped yet.

Kalam spoke about the important grids of knowledge, e-governance and healthcare wherein all universities, institutions, blocks and district level offices will be connected to each other leading to valued progress and telecom will be the major factor amidst all these units.

The president asked the countrymen not to lose heart on the brain drain that has been taking place and preferred converting the term “Digital Divide” to the term “Digital Bridge” and “Brain Drain” to “Brain Gain.”

Concluding the ceremony, Kalam showed some concern on the lack of priacy that individuals have today, and asked some serious assessment to be done in this respect.

“We should aim that 70 percent of telecom manufacturing should be done in India in the near future. Bandwidth must be largely available to millions as in that way, the whole planet will be connected,” he concluded.