On world Telecommunications Day yesterday state minister for communication Tapan Sikdar once again said that phones will be available on demand by 2002.
But such targets have been often set and often missed.
Things have, however, started improving in the past few years. In the past five years, the teledensity has increased from one per cent to 2.5 per cent. But it is still nowhere near the global level. The United States today boasts of a 64.4 per cent teledensity while Germany and the U K have 55 per cent and 54 per cent, respectively. Even in the Czech Republic about 40 per cent of the population has a fixed-line phone, and if cellular is added on then the teledensity level increases to 65 per cent. China, with which India is often compared, has also achieved a higher teledensity of 5.6 per cent.
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Though, India boasts of a teledensity of 2.5 per cent the urban-rural divide once again comes to the fore with rural areas showing a teledensity of 0.6. Till January 31, 2000 only about 58 per cent of the villages were covered by village public telephones, which means that a vast majority of the villages have just one phone at their disposal. The Department of Telecom Services has set itself a target of increasing teledensity (phones per 100 people) to seven per cent by 2002 and 15 per cent by 2015.
On the cellular front, again Indian operators haven't been able match the performance of some other countries. While China today boasts of over 35 million cellphone users, Indian operators can only show a total subscriber base of 1.88 million. In China about a million subscribers join the list every month whereas the figure in India is about one-tenth of that.
Operators blame it on issues like calling party pays (CPP) and the high entry fee that they had to pay. But things have clearly improved in the last few months thanks to the lower tariffs. The recent decrease in customs duty is also expected to help more customers come in.
But good news for the cellular business has meant bad news for the paging industry. The industry is reeling with operators like Max Page and Usha Martin deciding to exit from business.
Although the paging service operators have acquired about 15 lakh subscribers since 1995, active subscriptions are estimated at about eight lakh and about 25,000 new subscribers are added every month.