In the pre-liberalization era, Rajiv Gandhi will be
remembered for introducing new and vital institutions in India's telecom
scenario, driven by the belief that 'we can', rather than taking the
decisions because 'we have to'. He had the vision to back the rollout of a
PCO network in India. The popularity of PCOs was not simply due to the
availability of indigenous rural exchanges, but also because telecom was
increasingly seen as a vital infrastructure by the government circles.
While numbers can bear out the greater achievements of
successive governments, these governments owe their success in large part to the
institutions and the enthusiasm that sprung up during Rajiv Gandhi's tenure as
the PM of India. With C-DoT, he energized the Indian talent within and outside
the country for indigenous telecom development, which played a major role in
making telecom more widely available to the masses-before the mobile telephony
revolution. The wired network expanded with the rate of almost an exchange a
day. And all this happened much before any study came out pointing to the
correlation between teledensity and GDP.
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