At the invitation of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP research of relevance to the question of increasing services provided to users in rural areas was presented at a session chaired by Mr Shantanu Consul, Administrator of India’s USO Fund. In response to audience questions Executive Director Samarajiva stated that the higher-than-other-countries percentage of non-owner teleusers at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India showed that there was a real problem these people faced in getting connected. They could afford USD 5 per month for the services (and in some cases paid even more), but the difficulty was with the cost of getting connected (and coverage, of course).
The presentation can be downloaded here.
2 Comments
Ekta Rohra Jafri
Professor Samrajiva’s presentation was one of the highlights of the ‘Mobile information society’ session. Stats that I had been looking for, for a long time, surfaced. I have many many questions…Is there an e-mail ID that I can use to converse with him?
samarajiva
I can be reached through the contact buttin on the home page. The slides from the Convergence talk are now loaded above.
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