Tele-density and bikinis!

For those who may have missed out on this, it is a good news. A news to feel good about. It’s heartening to see our country’s tele-density cross the 50 percent mark. According to official figures released today, end July we had a total of 688.38 million Indians hooked on to a telephone. I am quoting a Press Information Bureau release (http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=0).


This takes the tele-density of the country to 58.15, which would mean every 59 out of 1000 Indians own a phone. Officially! Sounds interesting, and impressive. There are more interesting figures. Most of the people are preferring a mobile, or wireless, instead of a wireline. Little surprise the wireline tele-density has registered a decline.

I am happy, if this were one indicator of a nation’s progress, we surely are making decent headway. However, the problem is there are problems.

Today, most of the urban dwellers posses two to three handsets – I am a curious exception though! Call it demonstration effect or a compelling fashion statement, I have seen many people carrying two to three handsets – each ringing with equal frequency. This is besides the trend of offering a mobile phone to children of the well off in urban and semi urban India. So even as on paper we may claim to have made substantial progress in empowering ‘people’ by providing access to connectivity, this premise would be loaded with loopholes.

Another issue is one of usage patterns. I suspect, large part of the usage is going to the urban and semi-urban youth who are using a mobile phone more as a tool of entertainment than anything else you may like to call. During my recent visit to Koraput, a remote part of Orissa, I found many youngsters possessing handsets and when I asked them they said it was to keep in touch with friends and family. A tribal poor can’t afford a handset and hence the premise of empowerment too would be suspect. The tariff patterns are

This is a typical case of skewed and lopsided development, a malady that India has faced since independence prompting leaders such as Rahul Gandhi to perennially talk of two Indias – of rich and poor.

I would truly request Rahul Gandhi and his likes to look into such nitty gritty of development. Why doesn’t he ask telecom operators, who are minting money in hordes, to have a conducive tariff plan – a plan which even a poor is tempted to consider. The two Indias will continue to remain if we continue to ignore such minute details.

There is a saying – statistics are like bikinis. It reveals the critical but conceals the vitals.

Time to pull apart the bikinis!