Apathetic Condition of India

 

   India is one of the fastest growing country in mobile communication sector and didn’t implement 3G even with the advent of 4G where 3G had been implemented in Japan 10 years ago. Even countries which are less developed than India had implemented 3G .Now it is the stage where the developed and other countries are looking towards implementing 4G, India finds itself in an embracing situation of not implementing the 3G technology. The auction of the 3G spectrum had been delayed since two years and it was finally decided that the spectrum would be auctioned in Jan 2010 . But not it had been put off for the next fiscal year . The government has mismanaged the process of the 3G implemented since the inception of the process. First the government lame excuse  was that military has to release the spectrum. Even after military released the spectrum government took a year to call for the auction of the 3G spectrum. Even before the 3G spectrum allocation started the government was image was defaced with the 2G spectrum scam which involved loss of around 60,000 crores public money.The license fee for the 2G spectrum was fixed in 2001, when India had only four million subscribers, The same license fee was  simply applied  when spectrum licenses were granted in 2008, ignoring the fact that the subscribers number had crossed 300 million and the demand for the spectrum. Nothing prevented former telecom  Minister Raja to ‘gift’ licenses to the mobile companies at a throw away prices, though TRAI Chairman and Finance Ministry made objections. According to the TRAI ,this spectrum scam is because of  the entry of real estate brokers in the telecom sector or tussle in sharing of the scarce spectrum between the existing telecom brokers and new real estate brokers.

   The joke became a fact, when real estate companies Swan and Unitech bagged the spectrum license at a throw away price and they off-loaded their shares at a whopping price to multi-national telecom giants. The Swan Telecom bagged the license for Rs.1537 crore for operating in 13 circles. Within months (September) it sold its 45 per cent of shares to Etisalat, the telecom giant in UAE for 900 million US dollars (Approximately Rs.4500 crore).

     Similarly, the Unitech, another real estate company too entered into a bumper deal, without investing anything in telecom infrastructure. The company got license to operate in 22 circles for Rs.1651 crore. Within weeks, it sold 60 per cent shares for Rs.6120 to the Norwegian company Telenor, who is currently a major telecom player in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

    When the world average internet speed is 4Mbps, In the countries like Japan where the Internet speed is around 90 Mbps , India lags behind with average internet speed is 512 Kbps. when the Internet providers in America keep the internet download limit of maximum 250 Gb for a 8 Mbps connection, In India we have 10 Gb download limit for a 3.2 Mbps connection  which is below the global average.  The 3G technology is supposed to provide a of around 3 Mbs most of the mobile connections are provided with GPRS which has a theoretical speed of 128 Kbps but because of the congested network we get a speed of 70 kbps which is nearly equivalent to that of a dial up network. The speed for the 4G network has a theoretical speed of around 100Mbps download speed which would revolutionize our life . Hope so the government would speed up the 3G implementation and would look forward for the implementation of the 4G technology.