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There are over 170 million telephone connections in this country, but rural India is still lagging behind. Rural teledensity is only 3.5 per cent (against the national average of 16.6 per cent); not surprisingly, there are no telephone connections in over 30,000 villages. A look at the strategies being implemented to connect rural India to the rest of the country. The burgeoning of telephone networks worldover in the last five years has had its ramifications on the Indian telecom scene. The telephone growth in a country is measured by teledensity and measured as number of telephones per hundred population. India took more than 100 long years to reach a teledensity of 1 after the first telephone connection was laid in the year 1881 but it has taken only a few years to leap to the present figure of 16.6. There is a reason to despair as the rural density is only 3.5 per cent against the national average of 16.6 per cent and even more dismal is that 30,000 villages have no telephone connections at all. The study of the ICT spread among different nations including India reveals that to catch up with the developed countries a more focused development plan is required. The rural - urban divide A most striking attribute of the urban sector is the extraordinary rate of growth of the mobile telephone subscribers in the last two years - a new phenomenon of acquiring more than one cell phone per citizen over the last two years. A reduction in tariff by 90 per cent and 75 percent in instrument cost have enticed the growth of cellphones in these pockets. A mammoth task before the government is reaching out to the masses, constituting 75 per cent of the population. The four metros account for 20.6 per cent of the total 169 million telephone connections (both mobile and fixed put together) in the country whereas the population ratio stands at 4.7 per cent. To bridge the gap, a more focused and streamlined telecom infrastructure efforts are required. Under-developed telecom infrastructure and the sheer reasons of economics are predominant reasons for teledensity to be neglibile in rural pockets. Bridging The Divide The national telecom policy released in 2006 envisages a phone for three rural households by 2007 which it wants to reduce to one phone per two rural households by 2010. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) plans to raise the teledensity in rural areas from the current 3.5% to 15% by 2007 and has proposed a $1.8 billion subsidy for creating necessary infrastructure. With this kind of subsidy support, it will be possible to install 20,000 base stations in rural areas to cover about 80-90% of the villages. The Indian Telegraph (Amendment) Rules 2006 has been accepted by Parliament in order to enable support under the USO Fund for setting up and managing infrastructure sites and provisions of mobile and broadband services in specified rural and remote areas. CDMA-based service provider Tata teleservice has approached the Panchayati Raj ministry to find out if Panchayats can partner distributing its services in rural India. No formal proposal has been sent to the ministry as yet, but the Panchayati Raj Ministry has reacted positively . Such a collective effort provides a source of income to the 2.5 lakh Panchayats in the country and the government is striving to empower these institutions through its rural business programme. India lags far behind the U.S and China, which have more than 60 per cent and 23 per cent teledensity. There is a silver lining though; India is the fastest growing telecom market in the world.
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