Phone nightmare

In the 1980s, India had only fixed line telephones, and very few of them (in the early seventies I had read that New York City had more phones than the whole of India, but that was another era); call rates were like one rupee a minute – that would be equivalent to Rs. 20 or more a minute now, or thereabouts? – among the highest in the world.

The telecom ‘revolution’ began around the turn of the century (even 20 years ago, smartphones were toys for the rich to show off – only maidservants’ sons do that today). The business was opened up to the private sector just as worldwide the technology started developing and proliferating at the speed of a nuclear chain reaction. Phone ownership has since crossed 700 million and rising steeply, and there are more than 300 million smartphones in use. Call rates have dropped to near zero – you pay something like Rs. 150 (that’s little more than two US dollars) and get ‘unlimited’ calls for about a month, plus a lot of net surfing thrown in.  Meanwhile there is a dog eat dog fight going on among the service providers: they have already spent tens of thousands of crores to buy bandwith and licences, and as much again on building infrastructure, even as revenues are plummeting. Result: tens of millions of people who can’t afford (or don’t want) a good education or good housing and health care have phones glued to their ears more or less all their waking hours, on foot and in vehicles, at home and on the road, while the massively overstretched infrastructure is creaking and groaning at the joints. As any Indian who needs to talk urgently to someone far away for a few minutes at a stretch can tell you, getting through and finishing an important conversation is a nightmare, or else you must have two or three SIM cards to try with.

Unless I am much mistaken, this is a classic oligopoly in the making. A few gigantic (and ever growing-) firms with bottomless pockets – aided, no doubt by monstrous loans from banks which they have no strong intention of repaying in the foreseeable future – are slugging it out, hoping to remove all small rivals from the market who cannot take losses on that scale for long, so that those three or four gargantuan firms will finally have the whole market to themselves, and then they will in all likelihood carve it up among themselves to create regional monopolies (Only Mio in south India, only Windtel in the North and North West, only Concept in the centre and east, with TSNL to pick up the intermediate crumbs if it survives at all), following which they will at last begin the process of jacking up the tariffs to profitable levels again: and by God, they are going to be hefty jackups indeed, to compensate for the astronomical losses of yesteryear and then make the sort of profits that alone can satisfy those who are racing ahead to become the world’s first trillionaires…

For very, very small fish like me who do not want to use phones as playthings of an idle hour but would like to be able to make calls that get through instantly, always, and without interference and interruption, it couldn’t happen soon enough. At call rates of 20-30 rupees a minute, the lines would at last be clear again. How many would like to bet seriously against me that it wouldn’t happen within the next, say, five years?

P.S.: Oh, and before I leave… I am delighted to see that the blogpost titled To My Daughter in print has made it to the most-read list. As I have said before, it is a good feeling to see that the book keeps selling, and the publishers keep sending little amounts of royalty to the bank. Someday somebody is going to really read the book and write to me about it. Better still, write a review on Amazon or Goodreads.