|
 India
lives in her villages. So said the "father of the nation"
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Though it is still fairly fashionable
to quote him, many prefer to pay lip service to his ideals.
Consider the telecom industry, often lauded
as a shining example of a sector where the entry of private players
has worked wonders for the consumer. Call charges are down, telephone
connections are available at short notice, if not on demand, and
a mobile phone may soon no longer remain an accessory of just the
well-off. Well, that's only one side of the story.
What is not so well-publicised is that of the
6,07,491 villages in the country, close to one lakh (to be precise,
99,339) villages did not have a single phone till the end of 2002.
An important objective of the National Telecom Policy of 1994 was
that every village in the country should have a telephone by the
end of March 1997. Two years later, in 1999, another policy had
deferred this deadline to March 31, 2002. What transpired was that
by this date, a total of 4,69,010 village public telephones (VPTs)
had been installed, almost all of them by the public sector Bharat
Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
According to a report of the Comptroller &
Auditor General of India (CAG), private providers of basic telephone
services had committed themselves to installing as many as 98,000
VPTs by March 2002-in fact, the licences issued to private operators
by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) had specified that
one out of 10 telephones installed by these companies would be in
rural areas. How many VPTs were actually installed?The answer is
disappointing: 846.
That's not all. The CAG has hauled up the DOT
for providing private telecom operators financial benefits worth
Rs 812 crore for not adhering to their licence conditions. The generosity
shown to these operators caused a loss of Rs 720 crore to the exchequer
because instead of revoking their licences, the government authorities
generously let them off after payment of liquidated damages. To
add insult to injury, BSNL ended up spending Rs 93 crore setting
up VPTs that should have been set up by the private operators in
the first place.
How did this all happen? A particular licence
condition stipulated that liquidated damages would be paid at the
rate of Rs 66 per day of delay per village public telephone not
installed. Then came a clever catch. A cap of Rs 6.5 crore was placed
on the total amount that could be imposed as liquidated damages
on any operator.
Thus, private players, including companies
in the Tata, Reliance and Bharti groups, preferred to pay the maximum
damages that could be levied on them instead of installing phones
in villages. There was a moderate jump in the number of VPTs installed
between April and December 2002. Till the end of December 2002,
Tata Teleservices had set up 1,312 VPTs in Andhra Pradesh and 1,140
in Maharashtra, while Bharti had installed 348 VPTs in Madhya Pradesh,
Shyam had installed 926 in Rajasthan and Himachal Futuristic, 816
in Punjab. Reliance had not set up a single VPT in Gujarat, where
it holds a licence for basic telecom services.
Former Communications Secretary D.K. Sangal
says both the DOT and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
(TRAI) have been "extremely soft" on private operators
by not enforcing licencing conditions stringently. Left to themselves,
DOT and BSNL could have provided at least one phone in each village
in the country by March 2000, he feels. "We had a clear plan
that could have been implemented if the new regime favouring the
private sector had not come," says Sangal.
Communications Minister Arun Shourie loves
telling the world how India's public sector enterprises have been
treated like the private property of politicians and bureaucrats
in power. It may certainly be worth his while to examine how certain
leading lights of the country's private corporate sector have been
able to get away without fulfilling their obligations to society-that
too, at the expense of the much-maligned public sector, the minister's
favourite whipping boy.
The author is Director, School
of Convergence at IMI, New Delhi, and a journalist.
He can be contacted at paranjoy@yahoo.com
|
