June 1998                                                                        TELECOM LINE

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"The TRAI will have to staffed with young, achieving people--not persons to be rehabilitated after retirement or rewarded for collusion."

By T.H. Chowdary

In the 50 years of Independence, no Chief Minister has ever suggested to the Centre as to how it should structure its ministries. Chandra Babu Naidu, the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, while addressing an all-India seminar on venture capital to promote Indian infotech enterprises last month, called upon the Central Government to:

• Create a Ministry of Informatics, combining telecommunications, electronics, and the technical network of broadcasting (hardware).
• End the monopoly of VSNL (and DOT) on international (and interstate) telecom and Internet services.
• Enunciate a policy to transform public telephone (STD and ISD) booths into pubic tele-information centres (PTICs) where there will be telephone, fax, voice and text mail boxes (v-mail, E-mail), Internet service and desktop videoconferencing.

These are the steps I have been advocating for India to leap-frog into the information age; to perform successfully in the global economy, to develop our human resource rapidly and to create knowledge-based employment opportunities to our ever-increasing "educated" unemployed. I am sure that Naidu is following his call with a comprehensive memorandum to the Prime Minister on restructuring of the departments concerned with telecoms, computers, and broadcasting hardware. I am also sure that he is going to tell the PM how the vision and initiative of Giscard d'Estaing, the French President in the 1970s, led to the creation of organisations for informatics/telematiques, for digitalisation of the French telecom infrastructure, for the launch of minitel/telitel whereby tens of thousands of information-providers created content, stored it in France Telecom's computers (long before www) and were accessed by millions from inexpensive mini-terminals (much before desk-tops) which FT gave away freely. He transformed France into an info-society much ahead of the US though it lost out later as those who followed d'Estaing were not so much farsighted.

Steps Towards Implementation

Naidu's scheme and vision can be implemented only with the following pre-requisite steps.

• The service-provision operations of the DOT should be spun off as statewide corporate entities (exactly with the same status and operations are as those of P-Telcos) with interstate telecom owned and operated by Telecom India, the holder of interstate DOT assets. May be Telecom India can be the holding company (much like the pre-1984 AT&T) for the statewide DOT Telcos for a few years.
• The monopoly of DOT/VSNL should be ended by licensing a few interstate and international companies to compete with them The already licensed P-Telcos (basic and cellular) can be called to form two consortia companies to compete with the DOT/VSNL monopolies. The criteria should be least prices for long distance calls, indexed to the retail price index (as in UK and USA for AT&T).
• Allow the Railways, the National Power Grid Corporation, electricity boards and others to build broad-band, high-capacity, digital telecom infrastructures for lease to service providers--corporatised DOT's telecoms, P-Telcos, Internet service providers, e-Commerce and other electronic/photonic service providers to banks, insurance companies, schools, businesses, libraries etc.
• Assist/facilitate public-booth operators to upgrade into public tele-information centres by providing financial assistance for PCs, ISDN lines to install desktop videoconferencing equipment and provide all types of telecom and information services to the public as retailers of operators.
• Finally, scrap the Indian Telegraph Act 1885 and enact a new Telecom Law which is facilitative of multiplicity of network and services providers, maximising customer choice, and attracting investment. The TRAI will have to be revamped and strengthened. It has to be charged with a mission and staffed by young, energetic, talented, visionary and achieving people--not persons to be rehabilitated after retirement or rewarded for collusion and collaboration.

Chandra Babu Naidu is uniquely equipped to assist and supplement the PM's own thoughts about the prime role of IT in India's economic and human development and India's beneficial participation in global knowledge markets, because Naidu is not merely philosophising but practising--he is 'electronifying' his government over the State Wide Area Network (SWAN) and is going to demonstrate the benefits of its applications to the people of Andhra Pradesh. Also, he is aware that for the success of his attempts in Andhra, the taking of whole of India to IT is vital.

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