India will need to invest $14.43 billion (Rs 52,000 crore) over the next three years to achieve its teledensity (number of phone lines per 100 people) targets. The country has set itself a teledensity target of 2.34 for April, 2000, significantly more than the current 1.49 slated for the end of fiscal 1996-97.
To achieve its targets, India will need to add 9.62 million lines more than two-thirds of its existing 14.2 million-line basic telecom network. The teledensity targets have been spelt out in an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) report titled Asia Pacific Telecommunication Indicators released here on Sunday.
A senior official of the department of telecommunications (DoT) attending Asia Telecom 97 an ITU-organised quadrennial event focusing on telecom services and vendors in the region, which started here yesterday said that of the 9.62 million fresh telephone lines, the department would roll out between 7.5 million and eight million lines. The remaining 1.5-2 million lines are expected to be set up by private basic telecom operators.
China leads the list of countries in the Asia Pacific region with the highest investment requirements. For the period 1996-2000, the most populous country of the world intends to rollout about 75 million telephone lines a huge leap from its current base of about 55 million lines which will cost some $105 billion (Rs 3,78,000 crore). The countrys telephone capacity has grown at an astounding compound rate of 41.5 per cent in the 1990-96 period.
For the 1996-2000 period, India is second on the investment requirement list with $18 billion (Rs 64,800 crore).
The country spent about $3.5 billion during 1996-97, thereby bringing down investment requirements for 1997-2000 to some $14.5 billion. Japan follows China and India on the investment requirements list: it needs about $13.3 billion (Rs 47,880 crore) to finance a rollout of nine million lines.
Apart from the rollout plans and investment requirements in different countries of the Asia Pacific, the Asia Pacific Telecom Indicators looks in detail at the emerging telecom scenario in the region. According to it, the growth rate in the number of telephone lines in the region surpassed rates in other regions of the world. For instance, low income countries in the region have registered growth of close to 30 per cent a year.
However, despite the impressive rates, the teledensity of Asia Pacific countries is lower than that in Arab states or Latin American nations. As a result, governments have been increasingly resorting to private capital which is routed into projects on build-transfer-operate, joint operation schemes and business cooperation contracts and licensing of new market entrants, the report says.
It also charts the progress of new operators numbering about 80 odd in the region.
