Tharoor recalled the infamous words of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s communications minister in the 1970s, C.M. Stephen. In response to questions decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, the minister declared in Parliament that telephones were a luxury, not a right. He added that ‘any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone’ — since there was an eight-year waiting list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.
According to Tharoor, Mr Stephen’s statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong about the government’s attitude: ignorant, wrong-headed, unconstructive, self-righteous, complacent, unresponsive and insulting. “It was altogether typical of an approach to governance in the economic arena which assumed that the government knew what was good for the country, felt no obligation to prove it by actual performance and didn’t, in any case, care what anyone else thought.”
Shashi Tharoor is now a newly elected member of Parliament from Kerala, representing the same political party in the same state as the late Mr Stephen. Telecom has changed in India, but even more, mindsets within the Congress Party have changed! And that may be the greatest achievement of all!
Read the full blog entry, based on LIRNEasia research on teleuse at the bottom of the pyramid.
1 Comment
Abu Saeed Khan
Present days are equally bad, in India as well as many other countries, on high-speed access to internet. A fixed-phone operator, very correctly, pays no extra license fees while replacing the copper with fiber. But the governments, including of India, often prefer to reinvent the wheels of 3G and 4G licenses (We have seen its disastrous consequence in the continental Europe). A proprietary technology like WiMax also overshadows the policymakers’ psyche (We are watching its fate in the USA, Korea and elsewhere). And everything is being done in the name of “Bridging the digital divide.” Someday someone like Shahi Tharoor will recollect these foolishness. The readers will simply pity today’s intelligentsia!