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.

Mr. Joseph told reporters here on Friday that the Centre should intervene immediately to save the life of 30 lakh people who lived under the threat of a dam breach. If the situation warrants it, he is willing to quit office to save the life of the people. He is willing to go on fast to invoke the conscience of the people of Tamil Nadu. Since leaders of the national parties in the two States have adopted different stance on the issue, their Central leaderships should clarify their position. It is not an issue affecting Kerala alone. It should be discussed in Parliament. The Dam Safety Authority should implead itself in the case pending before the Supreme Court. Political parties and MLAs in Tamil Nadu should reconsider their stance. He and Revenue Minister Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan will go to New Delhi to apprise the Centre of the situation, Mr. Joseph said.

If the Mullaperiyar dam overflows, it will destroy the dams at Idukki, Cheruthoni, and Kulamavu and 30 lakh people will be wiped off. Any damage to the dam will also affect the farming activities in Theni, Madurai, Dindugal, Sivaganga, and Ramanathapuram districts in Tamil Nadu.

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.

Tata Teleservices, which has got GSM licence under dual technology policy, has also been allotted spectrum in the lucrative Mumbai circle while it is yet to get the radio frequency in other three circles.

With this, new players can now roll out services in 10 circles as the government has already released spectrum in six circles of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Karnataka, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.

In Punjab, only three players have been accommodated as only 15 MHz spectrum was available. HFCL, a CDMA player, has got GSM spectrum in Punjab under the dual technology policy. Idea Cellular and Unitech are the other beneficiaries.

Similarly in the UP (East) region, Unitech, Datacom, Swan Telecom and Tatas have been allotted the airwaves.

In Maharashtra, Datacom, Spice (Idea) and Unitech have got the spectrum, official sources said here.

In the CDMA space, Shyam Telecom is the only new company that has got pan-Indian spectrum and is in the process to roll out network.

Source: Business Standard

Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel, which had announced its entry into the Sri Lankan mobile phone sector with much fanfare last year, is experiencing delays and may well be re-drawing its investment plans for the island country, says a Sri Lankan telecommunication expert.

Rohan Samarajeewa, former head of Sri Lanka’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC), told IANS that while there was no doubt that Bharti Airtel was committed to operating in Sri Lanka, it had altered its timetable and could well be scaling down its original investment plans.

The reasons for the delay in starting the operations were in the realm of speculation, Samarajeewa said. But he did point to a possibility of difficulties in getting frequencies from the TRC, as it is generally recognized that the allotment of frequencies tends to be “highly politicised” in Sri Lanka.

The parent company in India could also be changing its priorities as regards capital allocations, in the context of the growing challenges in the more lucrative Indian domestic market, Samarajeewa said.

“Even assuming that the mobile phone market in Sri Lanka is 10 million, it is still only the size of a metropolis in India. It is therefore possible that Bharti Airtel is looking at some of the Indian states with greater interest,” he said.

In 2007, Bharti Airtel had set up a Sri Lankan subsidiary, Bharti Airtel Lanka Pvt Ltd., got a license to provide 2G and 3G services in collaboration with China’s Huawei Technologies, announced an investment of $200 million and began to recruit a large staff. The services were to begin by 2007 end. This subsequently got postponed to early 2008. But, as yet, there are no signs of an early start.

“When it announced its entry, I expected Bharti Airtel to literally slaughter the existing players. But given the recent changes in the price structure here, and the intense competition in the field, the Indian company will have to be quite creative if it is to be more than just a minor player,” Samarajeewa said.

The market is small and crowded. The fixed line and mobile phone penetration in Sri Lanka is very high. Forty to 50 percent of the households in the island (excluding the war-affected north and east) have access to a phone. Out of a total population of 20 million, six million have mobile phones. With the recently announced price reductions, the user-base is expected to rise to 10 million, or half the total population of the country.

There are already four players in the field. Among them, Dialog Telekom, a unit of Telecom Malaysia, has been the leader, controlling 60 percent of the market. Dialog has enjoyed brand loyalty for a considerable length of time throughout Sri Lanka, and is, therefore, no pushover.

Bharti Airtel would have to come up with innovative packages to attract the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder, an area of rapid growth in the foreseeable future, Samarajeewa pointed out. While price will be of the highest importance for those in the bottom-end of the social scale, technical qualities will be a clincher among the upper strata of society.

Asked for the reasons for the delay in starting operations, Bharti Airtel Lanka’s CEO, Amali Nanayakkara, said her company had very stringent requirements in regard to the infrastructure and that it would not start operations until all the requirements were met.

But she denied that there were any difficulties in getting official clearances. The setting up of the network was also proceeding satisfactorily. The company was “very happy” with the cooperation of the Sri Lankan authorities, and the pace of the work was also “very good”, Nanayakkara told IANS.

As for the price factor, she said that it was nothing new. “It was there right from the time we came here,” she said.

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More coverage available at:

AOL News

Kerala.com

NDTV.com

Lankaeverything.com

Elakiri.com 

Sapna Agarwal / Pune July 16, 2007The rural markets account for around 5 per cent of the national GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) handset sales. The figure is expected to rise to 25-30 per cent, adding around 100 million new cellular subscribers by 2009, according to a recent study by LIRNEasia and AC Nielson.
The statistics are significant for vendors such as Nokia, LG and Motorola, who are engaged in major brand-building initiatives across villages through ‘touch-and-feel’ experiences. Under the initiatives, the handset firms will introduce low-priced entry-level handsets and make them available in mandis, haats and rural retail chains. Nokia, for instance, has already announced localisation measures, which include developing strong regional content capabilities. Besides, it is also launching a new range of Nokia 1200 series priced between Rs 1,600 and Rs 5,000. The range will sport features suh as FM radio, General Packet Radio Service or GPRS (to surf the internet), camera, shared phone books and cost-tracker – a new feature, which will tell the user how much talk time is available and the cost per call.A recent Nokia study revealed that mobile phones were means to overcome infrastructure hurdles. The report also noted that prospective rural subscribers were reasonably heavy users, making an average of 40 calls a month. “Mobiles have the potential to increase a family’s savings by reducing the rural consumers’ unnecessary travel expenses for procurement of raw materials. Besides, farmers are using the phone to get prevalent market rates for farm produce through voice and SMSes and even GPRS if available,” said Devender Kishore, director, marketing, Nokia.

The survey further said, “With limited sources of getting news and entertainment coupled with hectic work schedules, mobile phones with features such as FM radio and GPRS, are a necessity in the rural areas.”
Following the survey, Nokia has announced a tie-up with Malayala Manoroma and launched a portal, where all the Nokia GPRS-enabled handsets users in Kerala will be able to get national and international news in their native language. “We are in the process of tying up with 10 other vernacular content providers in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada in association with leading media houses across India,” said Devender Kishore.

Before mobile phone were introduced or coverage was available in Kerala, fishermen would generally return to their “home” markets with their catch. Oversupply meant that fish had to be routinely dumped into the sea to keep prices stable even if (unknown to the fishermen) there were markets 10kms away were fish were in greater demand. Mobile phones enabled price information from other markets to be available while the fishermen was still at sea. The fishermen would divert his boat to the market that offered the highest price for his catch. After mobile phones were introduced, the practice of “dumping” fish overboard stopped; fishermen’s profit rose by 8% and consumer prices fell on average by 4%; the “law of one price” came into effect where single rate for sardine was obtained along the coast.

The Economist has a good write-up. A presentation by the author of the study.

I think more such microeconomic studies will make a stronger case for ICT’s impact on development compared to what has been attempted so far.