Telecom Game Changer, the Less Known One

It needed the mobile phone to create a serious increase in tele-density in India. Then, of course, the smartphone caused the numbers to explode. But, Montek Singh Ahluwalia points out in Backstage, long before those two transformational events in telecom, there was another game changer in India.

 

In 1987, Sam Pitroda was appointed telecom secretary. Remember, this was the era of landlines only. Expanding the tele-density was a desirable but nearly impossible task. After all, laying telecom lines was very expensive, and it needed electricity. The needle moved slowly, from 0.39 to 0.52 (that’s an increase from 0.39 phones per 100 people to 0.52 phones per 100) between 1985 and 1989.

 

New ideas were desperately needed. The solution they came up with was to license privately owned telephone booths, where calls would have a fixed cost, anyone could use them to make calls, and a percentage of the call charge would go to the booth operator. The STD booths were born, and helped achieve the intent (to some extent) by other means.

“Policy at the time still treated telecom services as a state monopoly but the STD booths were a form of privatizing the last mile of telecom access.”

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