Telecom Sector in India from Origin to Horizon: A Review over policies, regulations and strategies.

Abstract

India is the world’s fastest growing industry in the world in terms of number of wireless connections after China, with 811.59 million mobile phone subscribers1. TRAI has released their monthly Indian Telecom subscription report, and according to it, India has total of 1002 million telecom subscribers, out of which 975.78 are wireless (mobile) and 26.27 are wireline (landline) Urban India witnessed a monthly subscription increase of 0.01% percent or 0.05 million subscribers, while rural mobile subscriber base increased slightly by 0.57 percent or 2.38 million2.
Indian telecom sector is more than 165 years old. Telecommunications was first introduced in India in 1851 when the first operational land lines were laid by the government near Kolkata (then Calcutta), although telephone services were formally introduced in India much later in 1881. Further, in 1883, telephone services were merged with the postal system. In 1947, after India attained independence, all foreign telecommunication companies were nationalized to form the Posts, Telephone and Telegraph (PTT), a body that was governed by the Ministry of Communication. The Indian telecom sector was entirely under government ownership until 1984, when the private sector was allowed in telecommunication equipment manufacturing only. The government concretized its earlier efforts towards developing R&D in the sector by setting up an autonomous body – Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) in 1984 to develop state-of-the-art telecommunication technology to meet the growing needs of the Indian telecommunication network.