POSTMEN RING TELEPHONE BELL AT RURAL DOORSTEPS
S. C. Pandya *
It was our Prime
Minister’s 75th birthday and a Merry Christmas. For all the good
reasons, 25th December, 2002 was a day of rejoicing, more so for
the rural households. On this day, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee inaugurated
a unique mobile postman pilot project, christened as Gramin Sanchar
Sewa (GSS), to provide telephone facilities to every rural household,
initially in 8,000 villages - yet another milestone in the history
of over a century-and-a-quarter-old Indian postal system.
It was not just the
customary laying of a foundation stone. The Prime Minister actually
kickstarted a novel mobile postman telephone service. Whether
a letter is to be delivered or not, the postman, along with a
bagful of letters, also carries and displays a wireless phone,
called fixed wireless terminal (FWT), for the householders to
receive or make a telephone call. The householders can make not
only local calls but national and international calls as well
at normal PCO rates.
These phones have
in-built display units which show the number of pulses for determining
the duration of an outgoing call. Once the call is over, an on-the-spot
bill is presented for instant payment by the person making the
call. For easy calculation, a ready reckoner has also been provided
along with the phone in the local language.
Disbursing money
orders worth crores of rupees in lakhs of villages month after
month, the hard-working postman who is honest to the core, is
ironically labeled as the symbol of India’s snail mail. However,
with the launching of the GSS scheme, the same postman has become
the trendiest of the lot in the rural areas.
The pilot project
was allocated a modest budget of Rs.2.5 crore, to begin with.
As of August 7, 2003, as many as 1969 rural postmen were providing
this facility in about 8,938 villages. These postmen are extra-departmental
employees of the Department of Posts. As an incentive for providing
this service, they are paid a 20 per cent commission on every
outgoing call while the Department of Posts gets a 5 per cent
commission. In addition, the postmen are entitled to claim rupees
five for passing on a telephone message to the concerned person
in the village.
Encouraged by the
tremendous success of the pilot project, the Government has initiated
the process of implementing this scheme in an additional 8,000
villages across the country. By all means, this is an innovative
scheme designed to supplement the Government’s commitment of providing
telephones in every village.
But the big question
still remains unanswered. Can a postman, pedaling a worn out cycle
over dusty village tracks, most often pug dundees, or traversing
mountainous roads in remote and inaccessible villages on foot,
ever fulfil the dream of providing phones in every village households?
The answer is a clear No.
It is an internationally
accepted fact that low teledensity, i.e. the number of telephones
per 100 persons, is the sure shot recipe for backwardness. As
of now, it is abysmally low at 1.4 in rural India. No doubt, BSNL
is trying its best to provide maximum rural connectivity to increase
the rural teledensity. It has, indeed, done an enormous task by
providing phones in more than 5 lakh villages, out of a total
of over 6 lakh villages, and has set a target to cover 35,000
more villages during 2003-04.
On the contrary,
all six private operators who started operations from 1998 onwards,
had rolled out services in only 7,123 villages by July, 2003.
While accepting license, they had committed to provide telephones
in 97,806 villages, by the year 2000, in six States, namely, Andhra
Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan.
In all these years, they have not been able to fulfil even 10
per cent of their commitment.
In fact, for non-commissioning
of the promised services, they have, so far, paid Rs.53.75 crore
as penalty rather than providing rural phones simply because,
as per the private operators’ claim, it is far too expensive for
them to install, commission and maintain rural telephones. Both
the public and private sector telecom managers are unanimous in
their view that the investment-return equation just does not work
out in hinterland phone networks. What to say of earnings, even
revenues elude forever.
For surmounting this
financial hurdle, the Government committed itself to universal
service obligation (USO) to provide telecom facility at affordable
rates in the rural and remote areas whether it is commercially
viable or not. After exhaustive deliberations with the industry
and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (TRAI) recommended, in January 2003, that five
per cent of the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) of telecom operators
as well as carriers should be allocated, out of the licence fee
collected by the Government, for funding universal service obligation.
Convinced about the
necessity of providing financial support to USO, the Union Cabinet
gave statutory backing, on July 11, 2003, for carving out a separate
fund for the purpose. A bill to amend the Indian Telegraph Act,
1885, for creating this fund, was introduced in the Lok Sabha
on August 4, 2003. After the proposal gets cleared by Parliament,
the corpus will be put under the USO Administrator. Private operators
should, then, have no difficulty in fulfilling their village public
telephony (VPT) obligation.
Meanwhile, as a parallel
exercise, the Government collected Rs.1,760 crore, during 2002-03,
for the USO fund. For the first time, in May, 2003, a sum of Rs.250
crore was disbursed from this fund to fixed line service providers
for meeting operational costs in providing rural phones. A major
share of Rs.247 crore went into BSNL’s kitty since it operates
the maximum number of village phones. The balance was distributed
between private operators.
In addition to the
Government’s untiring efforts, a Hyderabad-based non-government
organisation (NGO) has also been in the news, for the last about
one year, for bridging the digital divide between urban and rural
areas. In nearly 200 households of a remote village called Kalleda,
in Warrangal district of Andhra Pradesh, life has not been the
same ever since the introduction of a "gram phone" by
the NGO in the village.
The world has come
within the talking distance of these villagers by paying just
Rs.12.50 per month for a phone in their house. For this amount,
they can make 30 outgoing local calls and receive an unlimited
number of incoming calls every month. Of course, BSNL helped the
NGO in the execution of this project. Eager to provide this facility,
the Madhya Pradesh Government has approached this NGO to replicate
the Kalleda experiment in the State’s villages as well.
It is estimated that
BSNL has nearly 25,000 rural exchanges spread all over the country.
Because of the unaffordable tariff structure, so far as the rural
poor are concerned, all these exchanges remain under-utilised.
The NGO, however, claims that if BSNL introduces these phones
through its rural exchanges, it would not only heavily reduce
its subsidy burden involved in rural telephony, but would also
increase its revenue by about Rs.4,000 crore per annum. The icing
on the cake would be availability of affordable telephones to
the rural poor scattered all over the inaccessible and remote
areas.
Finding reasonable
justification in the NGO’s claims, the Department of Telecommunications
appointed a three-member committee in July 2003 to make an indepth
study of the project and report back to DoT on its feasibility.
On its part, the NGO is, however, more than confident about the
outcome of the study. Once implemented, the Government will fulfil
its promise of providing phones in every village, BSNL will get
rid of the subsidy being given to rural phones and the poor villager
will get a really affordable phone. Indeed, a win-win-win situation
for all the three stake holders!
*
Senior Freelance Journalist
