Towards a Telecommunications Revolution in India

By T. H. CHOWDARY

Summary

T. H. Chowdary’s Forum of Free Enterprise booklet reproduces a public talk on the worldwide telecommunications and information revolution and its implications for India. Part I surveys how advances in micro-electronics, satellites, optical fibre and digital switching have transformed telecommunication networks into carriers of information itself — voice, text, data, graphics and video. Chowdary argues that the storage, retrieval and processing of information has become a strategic economic resource, that ‘Information and knowledge are power’, and that falling chip and circuit costs are rapidly bringing the Personal Computer, electronic mail, facsimile, cellular ‘personal communication’ and small satellite earth stations within reach of ordinary citizens. A recurring point is the collapsing cost of capacity: he contrasts the steep, repeatedly-raised tariffs on Indian domestic circuits with the plummeting cost of international satellite circuits, and notes that production economics no longer support the old view of telecommunications as a natural monopoly.

Key points

• Frames telecommunications as the transport layer for information, which Chowdary treats as a strategic economic resource and a form of power available to every citizen.

• Surveys the enabling technologies: micro-electronics and ICs, packet-switched data networks, electronic mail, facsimile overtaking telex, cellular ‘personal’ phones, INTELSAT satellites, and optical fibre.

• Stresses dramatically falling costs — chips from hundreds of dollars to cents, international satellite half-circuits from $32,000/year toward about $1 a day.

• Contrasts expensive, repeatedly-hiked Indian domestic circuit tariffs with far cheaper international satellite/cable capacity, citing the Videsh Sanchar Nigam gateway packet switch.

• Argues the traditional view of telecommunications as a natural monopoly is being undermined, citing ~20 countries that moved to corporatise and ‘peoplesify’ their networks.

• Part II (‘A Policy Framework’) sets out government objectives: from monopoly to multiplicity of producers, from budget to people for funds, from bureaucracy to people-orientation, from administered prices to cost-based charges.

• Proposes structural reforms — splitting services into state/regional operating companies under an all-India holding company, tax holidays, a telecom development finance corporation, and equity offered to institutions, employees and the public.

• Calls for adequate R&D funding (including an R&D cess), a new Telecommunications Commission, and replacing the century-old Indian Telegraph Act with legislation recognising a citizen’s right to information.

Generated by the v1.5 extraction pipeline. Awaiting editorial review.