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It was about eighteen years ago that we got a Department of Telecom (known as BSNL today) phone installed at my home in Aligarh, after a waiting period of a few years. It was celebration time-sweets were distributed among neighbors, and a trunk call was made to all others in the family who owned a phone. We had not even heard of mobile phones.

Sensing the high utility value of a communications device like a phone, and the shabby treatment common subscribers got at the hands of the government, visionaries like Sunil Bharti Mittal decided that telecom service was the business to be in. At a time when Bharti was treating telecom like a big untapped opportunity, the Government of India believed that it was doing Indians a big favor by giving them phones. Even when telecom was thrown open to the private sector, DoT refused to believe that they needed to change.

Ibrahim Ahmad

When VOICE&DATA started in 1994, Bharti was a nobody, and DoT was the big father. I remember meeting the first MD of BSNL (the new name of the corporatized DoT) at an industry function, who casually said that Bharti will take a 100 years to catch up. What a world of fancy he was living in! It has been about fifteen years and Bharti has beaten BSNL to be India's biggest telecom operator.

Enough dissection has been done of what Bharti did which BSNL could not do, and yet more analyses will keep coming up. The bottomline, according to me, which made the difference was the “Customer is King” approach of Bharti versus the “I am the King” attitude of BSNL. The customer might actually not have been the king for Bharti, but the customer was surely that entity around which everything at Bharti revolved.

The question is whether BSNL can re-capture its crown. Theoretically, yes. Practically, looks almost impossible. But, corporate turnarounds do happen. The future of telecom in India to a large extent lies in the semi urban and rural areas and nobody is better geared for that market than BSNL. The current men at the helm at BSNL can do it, but the government must want it. And not just want it, but sincerely support it in letter and spirit.

As I trek with my family in the remote villages of a far off mountain resort, Mukteshwar, 7,500 feet above sea level and 50 kilometers beyond Nainital, I do not have easy access to water or transport, but I am connected to the world through my mobile phone. And I thank BSNL for at least ensuring that its competitors had no option but to rollout services in such far off places. And by the way, it is BSNL which has taken the Internet to small villages around Mukteshwar, which is famous for the panoramic view of the Hiamalayas. It is another story that one day some private player will reap the benefits.

ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in