Recently an Indian government accountant found the telecommunications ministry's guilty for $38.9 billion in lost potential revenue for the government. The accountant noted that the distribution in 2008 used the same fixed rates for bandwidth as were used in 2001. This is crazy because of India’s recent economic growth through the past decade. The allegations over the mishandling of the spectrum allocation forced the resignation of Andimuthu Raja as telecommunications minister last weekend, the latest government official to resign under pressure.
This is such a huge issue because India is one of the largest future telecommunications markets in the world. India is the 2nd market behind the dominant Chinese market for wireless services. There was a miniscule four million mobile services subscriber in 2001 and as 2008 this number has skyrocketed to 300 million.
This issue has caused India more than just monetary losses but also a loss governmental respect. Simple errors like Gaps in policy implementation and not consulting the Telecom Commission were some of the crucial errors which caused such losses. This is going to be a major setback for this rapidly developing market which is going to have to reevaluate a lot in its telecommunications ministry.
Source:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312504575618262238669660.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews#articleTabs%3Dcomments
I saw this story and I found it really interesting.
ReplyDeleteHow do you think India is going to shift or change their telecommunications policy in the coming year based upon these losses?
Do you think there will be increased government intervention in telecommunication or will there be a larger role for the private sector?