The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

Excerpts from Shashi Tharoor's, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone



In March 2007, seven million Indians subscribed to new mobile phones.That's a world record. In September 2006, India overtook China for the first time in the number of telephone subscribers per month. We're still way behind China in the total number of cellphone users(just over 140 million against their 450 million), but each month the gap is narrowing. By 2010, the government tells us we'll have 500 million Indian telephone users. China will probably be still ahead, but on a phones-per-capita basis there will be little to choose between us.

Now to anyone who grew up in pre-liberalization India, that's astonishing. Bureaucratic stat-ism committed a long list of sins against woeful state of India's telephones right up to the 1990s, with only eight million connections and another 20 million on the waiting lists, would have been a joke if it wasn't also a tragedy- and a man-made one at that. We had possible the worst telephone penetration rates in the world. The government's indifferent attitude to the need to improve India's communications infrastructure was epitomized by prime minister Indira Gandhi's Communications Minister, C.M. Stephen, who declared in parliament, in response to a question decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, that telephones were a luxury, not a right and 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.
Stephen's statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong with the government's attitude. It was

• Ignorant (he clearly had no idea of the colossal socio-economic losses caused by poor communications),
• Wrong-headed (he saw a practical problem only as an oppertunity to score a political point),
• Unconstructive(responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparantely did not occur to him),
• self-righteous (the socialists cant about telephone being a luxury and not a right),
• complacent (taking pride in a waiting list the existence of which should have been a source of shame, since it pointed to the poor performance of his own ministry in putting up telephone lines and manufacturing equipment),
• unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience, and the fees, of the country's telephone subscribers) and
• insulting(asking long suffering telephone subscribers to return their instruments instead of doing anything about their complaints).

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.