Indian telecommunication industry is a giant in this field. It has the second largest telecommunication network with about 464.82 million mobile phones. I hope India will emerge as the first in this field soon and will remain first for long, as India is such a potential nation.
In my childhood a land phone was considered luxury in our society. The only land phone available in my village was the one at our local postal office. Mobile phones were not even in our dreams I think. This is the picture of my village in 1980’s and in early 90’s. But now the whole scene is changed. I doubt that if there any family or even any person without a mobile phone now. Even the school going students too own new generation mobile handsets, and some do have multiple connections. My village is a typical example of the villages all over India. In short India is a surprising country; on the one hand It is known for great poverty and underfed children, on the other hand India surprises the Western world with its advanced information technology and highly respected scientists. I think India is going through a revolution in the field of telecommunication.
In 1990s the telecom sector in India was opened up by the Government for private investment as a part of Liberalization-Privatization-Globalization policy, up to then it was a monopoly of the government. Many private operators, such as Reliance India Mobile, Tata Telecom, Vodafone, Bharti, Idea etc., successfully entered the high potential Indian telecom market. Now there are three types of players in Indian telecom services: State owned companies (BSNL and MTNL); Private Indian owned companies (Reliance, Tata etc); Foreign invested companies (Hutchison-Essar, Vodafone etc). One of the attractive investment icons in the Indian share market is telecommunication shares.
The telecom reforms have allowed the foreign telecommunication companies to enter Indian market which has still got huge potential. In a recent study by a leading web site about the Indian telecommunication Industry it is said that, much of the growth in Asia Pacific Wireless Telecommunication Market is spurred by the growth in demand in countries like India and China and India ‘s mobile phone subscriber base is growing at a rate of 82.2%.
It is known that the total revenue in the telecom service sector was Rs. 86,720 crore in 2005-06 as against Rs. 71, 674 crore in 2004-2005, registering a growth of 21%. The total investment in the telecom services sector reached Rs. 200,660 crore in 2005-06, up from Rs. 178,831 crore in the previous fiscal. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) has very aggressive plans to increase the pace of growth, targeting 500 million telephone subscribers by end-2010. Most of the expansion in subscribers is set to occur in rural India. India’s rural telephone density has been languishing at around 1.9%; since 70% of total population is rural, the scope for growth in this Industry is unprecedented.
