The Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) is planning to restructure its tariffs and step up its marketing efforts for the special services that allow subscribers to turn telephone calls into a lucrative business opportunity. Speaking enthusiastically about the potential, MTNL chairman and managing director S Rajagopalan says: "I expect a boom now."
Among the schemes already available is the Intelligent Network (IN), through which subscribers can rent special numbers for which the tariff charged is Re 1.20 per two second pulse. Of this the subscriber gets 70 paise and the MTNL keeps 50 paise. This works out to be Rs 36 per minute for the caller.
Acknowledging that not more than 30 or 40 subscribers have opted for this scheme in the year since it has been available, Rajagopalan says he intends very soon to initiate marketing efforts and make changes in tariff to make the scheme more attractive. He hints that the deposit now charged may be sharply reduced or done away with altogether. Acknowledging that such requirements suggest a lack of trust in the subscriber, he adds, "I can't do business in that manner."
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The potential is huge for television programmers who design their programmes around telephone calls. For instance, a high profile quiz show offering a huge prize for the winner could hope to draw hundreds of thousands of callers every week. The calls are generally answered through a taped set of questions, designed to make each call last at least a couple of minutes.
Each 100,000 calls could bring in about Rs 50 lakh as revenue even before the advertisements come on. M K Sehgal, Chairman of Future Zone Entertainment, plans such a TV quiz show and acknowledges that he hopes to bring in revenue through both advertising and the telephone calls.
In the west, says Rajagopalan, such schemes bring in vast numbers of calls and often risk jamming the network for a while because TV shows offer a prize for the first ten or first hundred callers. Thankfully, he says, Indian programmers have not yet been offering such lures and allow callers to call in at any time over a week.
The Intelligence Network is designed to take the extra load off the main network. The Network is in fact a computer to which all calls to the special numbers are diverted from whichever exchange they are made. Billing too becomes that much more streamlined.
A scheme that has had more takers so far than the IN is the premium rate that callers are charged for calls to certain phones, at which they can get their horoscopes read or marital matches arranged over the phone. The caller is charged double the normal rate, half of which goes to the owner of the premium rate line.