Rohan Samarajiva, Chair and CEO of LIRNEasia will deliver the inaugural lecture on Tariff Regulation in South Asia. Tariff regulation has in the recent past attracted the attention of both the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India as well as the Telecom  Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal, as well as the Department of Telecom at the Union Ministry of Communications. India has a burgeoning and competitive cellular services provider market, and tariff regulation has far-reaching impact on this industry. Moreover, as aware consumers of mobile telephony and data services, this is an issue that is relevant for all of us. ROhan will adddress not just from Indian perspective but from a pan-Asian viewpoint.

The lecture will be at the  NLSIU, Bangalore on Sunday, the 27th of May, 2012 from 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm. The hour-long session will include both a lecture and an interactive session with the speaker.

Interested persons are requested to register for the lecture series by sending an email to editorialboard@ijlt.in

The address of the college is

National Law School of India University

Jnanabharati Road, Nagarbhavi

Bangalore – 560072

Google maps location: http://g.co/maps/ppwcr

Agriculture employs about half of India’s work force, for example, yet the agricultural revolution that flourished in the 1970s has slowed. Crop yields remain stubbornly low, transport and water infrastructure is poor, and the legal system is hostile to foreign investment in basic agriculture and to modern agribusiness. Note that the earlier general growth bursts of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were all preceded by significant gains in agricultural productivity.

The results were far more dramatic. Well after the financial help and hand-holding had stopped, the families of those who had been randomly chosen for the BRAC programme were eating 15% more, earning 20% more each month and skipping fewer meals than people in a comparison group. They were also saving a lot. The effects were so large and persistent that they could not be attributed to the direct effects of the grants: people could not have sold enough milk, eggs or meat to explain the income gains. Nor were they simply selling the assets (although some did).

Communication: A telephone, whether a land line or mobile, is used by 63 percent of total households – 82 percent in urban areas and 54 percent in rural areas, an increase of 54 percentage points from 2001. A mobile phone is owned by 59 percent of households.

There has been a huge jump in television ownership – up from 15.6 percent to 43 percent in since 2001.

A computer or laptop is owned by 20 percent of the households in urban India and just 5 percent in rural areas. Only 3 percent of overall households have an internet connection.

Analysis will follow.

Poonam’s life has been transformed since she started using a mobile phone in 2007. It helped her to develop a small business as a beautician. She promotes herself and keeps in touch with her customers through the mobile. Her income – an average of INR 2,000 a month (approx USD 40)

The Indian government wants the current Internet Governance Forum to be beefed up so that it will actually produce decisions. Those who do not represent governments would prefer not to, because the word-by-word negotiations that would result from such a change would not be productive and because such a procedure would necessarily privilege governments. They would prefer decision to be taken elsewhere, informed by IGF discussions. There was no enthusiasm from anyone for the idea of an International Internet Union as favored by Hamadoun Toure and Vladimir Putin.

Partly due to bad architecture (too big a room; too high a stage; big old barriers between audience and panel), it was not the most lively of sessions. I tried hard to allow for questions from the audience and the promised participants from afar, but got only one person asking questions. It could have been livelier, but I think we did justice to the key issues.

For those who like such things, video and transcripts are available here.

ITS has a new tagline “a meeting of minds among industry, government and academia.” Guess this kind of puts it in the same space as CPRsouth. The Minister of Telecom, Mr Kapil Sibal, the Secretary of DoT, Mr Chandrashekar though advertised, failed to show. I’d have been surprised had they come for such a small crowd. Sudharma Yoonaidharma from Thailand was also a no-show. But plenty of Indian telecom glitterati were present: TRAI Chair Dr Sarma, Mr Ravi Sankar, the man in charge of the USD 4.4 Billion USF and slated to head the National Optical Fiber Agency that is intended to mop up the money; Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala; Professor Abhay Karandikar; and COAI Director General Rajan Mathews. There are plenty of meetings of mind and otherwise among government and industry in New Delhi. Having the academics engaged was good, but there weren’t enough of them and not all of their research was actionable. And I guess it’s a difficult thing to get industry representatives away from the routine of public lobbying they are so accustomed to, even at an international research conference.

It was surprising that an event intended to showcase one of India’s great success stories was located in a decrepit, crumbling government hotel. Perhaps this was intended to remind us that not all of India works as well as the mobile industry. But in the end, small irritations such as having to pass through multiple security screens to eat lunch every day fade away when one has one useful conversation in a hallway with a colleague. There were plenty of these. So to me, the two days were well spent.

The production values may be a little amateurish by MTV standards, but for $2,000 it cost a small fraction of the typical budget for a professional film. And Mr. Smith has attracted some of music’s most important currency: attention. Since being posted to YouTube on Feb. 2 “Smoke and Mirrors” has been watched more than 179,000 times, and a recent post about it by Mr. Smith’s brother became one of the top articles on Reddit, the social link aggregator.

The video is one example of the breadth of outsourcing, which has come to include the kind of highly specialized skills — like microchip design, which I.B.M. contracted to an Indian company in 2005 — that were once considered unexportable. Companies in the West often claim that while they outsource factory jobs, the creative and innovative work is still done at home.

“You hear so much about big corporations outsourcing,” Mr. Smith said by phone on a break from his day job teaching English to immigrants in Hamilton, Ontario. “I was just trying to think of a unique way to release the album and promote it.”

While outsourcing was once viewed strictly as a cost-cutting privilege of giant corporations, it is increasingly available to smaller companies and even individuals.

I chaired the session on international and Indian best practices and made a presentation based primarily on the experiences of designing e Sri Lanka back in 2002-03 and LIRNEasia research.

My key message was that there were no best practices that could be imported to Kerala. What were best were what fit the specific circumstances. These included a majority of the population owning feature phones and most people not having credit/debit cards.

So my suggestions for the Government of Kerala included making government data public in computer-readable form with minimal restrictions so that app developers could make them into usable applications for Kerala citizens, and working on setting in place the institutional arrangements for location-based services by focusing first on cell broadcasting.

The last time I was in Kovalam (in the very same hotel, Vivanta by Taj, then Taj Green Cove), it was for a similar small high-powered session on Indian telecom policy pulled together by Aspen in early 2008. Its recommendations gained significant traction.

I have a feeling that something good will come of this meeting too.

But I hope I am wrong and that there will be real implementation. A low-hanging fruit is bilateral lowering of roaming charges and termination charges for calls from Sri Lanka to India and vice versa. We have been waiting for SAARC to implement these things, much easier if India and Sri Lanka show how it can be done.

Sri Lanka and India have signed an agreement to set up a mechanism of technical and institutional cooperation in telecommunications. It aims to develop telecommunications in both the countries particularly in the areas of technology and access to telecommunication services, a statement from the Indian High Commission said.

The deal covers oversight of service provision, convergence, next generation networks, new technologies, spectrum issues, number portability, and economic regulation, it said.

Witnesses in Chennai and Pondicherry said trees had been toppled, there had been power outages throughout the night and disruption to phone and internet services in some areas.

Hundreds of people from fishing communities along north Tamil Nadu’s coast, and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state, have moved to schools set up as relief centres until the weather system passes.

“Making relief efforts diffuclt, roads are blocked because of heavy rainfall, trains were canceled and international flights also canceled,” Al Jazeera’s Prerna Suri said.

“They had about 24 hours to prepare, unlike with other storms. So evacuation shelters are in place,” our correspondent said. “Eight teams from the disaster management force are deployed from New Delhi, with some 15,000 people put on high alert.”

The logic for substituting spectrum for civil works and vice versa depends on the price of spectrum. This is sort of like the perennial debate about energy scarcity. One group says we’re running out of oil. But other points out we will never run out of energy because as oil prices increase, more reserves will become visible, more energy sources will become viable. This is the story of shale, the new, new thing in energy. So it’s very difficult to define scarcity independently of price.

The alternative approach was tried by a consulting firm in India few years back. They changed their name a few years back and thus obliterated both names that were stored in my neurons. Their approach was to work some fancy benchmarks based on user numbers, terrain, etc. According to that study, India had a spectrum shortage. But the story is of course different in Lutyens Delhi (most likely there is a shortage) and remote Himachal (most likely not). So the unit of analysis is key to this approach.

So that is why I am skeptical about the statement below:

In a statement, AT&T said that the actions of the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice harmed customers. The cellular giant explained that the American wireless industry is suffering a spectrum shortage, which the merger would have mitigated.

“The AT&T and T-Mobile USA combination would have offered an interim solution to this spectrum shortage. In the absence of such steps, customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled,” the company said.

Irrespective of the fate of T Mobile, it would be good to find an answer to the question “what is spectrum shortage”?

Mobile Internet fastest growing vertical, says Google India MD.

Listing a set of next big trends in the overall technology sector, Google India says mobile Internet is set to lead the way for the industry. As against 14 per cent in the US, 11 per cent in Russia, and 6 per cent in the UK, Google India sees about 40 per cent search queries from mobile phones in the country.

“Mobile phones are the future. More smartphones and tablets are being shipped in India than desktops and laptops. In fact, about 40 per cent of search queries for Google India comes from mobile phones as against US (14), UK (6) and Russia (11),” said Rajan Anandan, managing director of Google India during a speaker session at ‘Confluence 2011′ on Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) campus.

In addition to language skills, the Philippines has better utility infrastructure than India — so companies spend little on generators and diesel fuel. Also, cities here are safer and have better public transportation, so employers do not have to bus employees to and from work as they do in India.

Full report.