Teledensity — the great urban-rural divide
— Photo: N. Sridharan
PHONE PROLIFERATION:There has been an astronomical rise in telephone connections in the four Metros in the last few years.
TELEDENSITY IS the indicator of the telephone growth in a country and measured as number of telephones per hundred population.
Due to the explosive growth of telephone networks worldover in the last five years, there is a steep increase in the teledensity. In India during the last three years, the graph of the magic figure teledensity has been shooting up fast and has reached 15 at the end of September 2006.
India took more than 100 long years to reach a teledensity of 1 after the first telephone connection was given in the year 1881 but it has taken only a few years to leap to the present figure of 15.
Slow growth
The era of landline connections under monopoly of the department of telecommunication, Government of India had a very slow growth during the last century and it started picking up only after 1995 when the first competitive regime was opened with the participation of private operators in the field of cellular mobile telephony.
When the teledensity of major countries like U.K., U.S., Japan, Singapore and Korea was in the two digit figures as early as in 1991, the Indian figure stood at less than 0.6 and the main cause attributed was the lack of telecom infrastructure development in many areas especially in the rural parts of our country where more than 75 per cent of the population lives.
A great challenge
Reaching the unreached was a great challenge over the years. It is felt that the digital divide will shrink only on expanding the telecom network and computer awareness extensively to the most populated rural areas.
The study of the ICT spread among different nations including India reveals that to catch up with the developed countries a more focused development plan is required.
The contrast is the astronomical rise in the figures reached in the provision of telephone connections in the four Metros in the last few years accounting for 20.6 per cent of the total 169 million telephone connections (both mobile and fixed put together) in the country whereas the population ratio stands at 4.7 per cent only.
High rise
Interestingly, the high rise in telephone density in urban centres are attributed to unprecedented extraordinary rate of growth of the mobile telephone subscribers in the last two years — a new phenomenon of acquiring more than one cell phone per citizen.
There has been a reduction in tariff by 90 per cent and instrument cost by 75 per cent over the years. There are no new takers for the landlines in these Metros except for adding Broadband.
In some of the states, which are under-developed in telecom infrastructure, as in other areas as well, and due to the non-affordability of the poor general public to own a telephone connection, the teledensity is at a low ebb still.
All earlier forecasts of mobile growth have been simply belied as the total mobile connections in India crossed 124.5 million in mid-October 2006 whereas the forecast was that it would reach only 100 million in December 2006.
The total subscriber base, landline and mobile put together, stands at 169.9 million as on 30th September 2006 (taking teledensity to 15.45) as against the figure of 112.7million (10.2) as on 30th September 2005 indicating a rate of growth of 50.6 per cent during the last year.
Far behind U.S., China
The government had set a target of 250 million subscribers and 22 per cent teledensity in India by the end of 2007 with a focused development plan. If the present trend continues it may not be difficult to achieve this target. Currently the rural density in India stands at 2 per cent compared with urban teledensity of 31 per cent. According to ITU, India is far behind the U.S. and China, which have more than 60 per cent and 23 per cent teledensity.
A. GANESAN
Deputy General Manager
BSNL, Chennai
aruganesan@hotmail.com
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