It is more of a presumed conviction than a reality that rural telephony is costly in capital construction and very unprofitable in operation, because of a limited number of calls and even more limited range of calling.

In the absence of actual information, all discussions on rural telecommunications are based on the above assumption, which may not be, and is most probably not, true. Some pertinent questions need to be answered. They are as follows.

• What is the capital investment in what the DoT calls rural and remote area telephone network?

• What are the operating and maintenance expenditures on this segment of the telecom network?

• What is the revenue from rural telephone subscribers and village public telephones, separately from those who have and don’t have STD/ISD facility?

• What is the dispersion, i.e. the distribution of the long distance calls from rural exchanges in different distance slabs and the corresponding revenue?

• What is the number of calls and what are the revenue from the village public telephones?

• What is the number of calls and revenue from rural telephone subscribers?

• What are the equipped capacities, working connections, waiting list and the percentage utilization of the installed capacity in the rural areas?

• What is the quality of service for rural areas, i.e. number of complaints and faults per hundred customers and the average duration of the fault?

• What had been the DoT/DTS targets for VPTs year-wise, in the last ten years and what have been the achievements?

• Has there been a study as to why targets were not achieved and were any corrective and punitive (for under-achievement) measures taken?

• Was any study undertaken to ascertain the serviceability (usability) of the public telephones, the quality of service and were any improvement measures effected and what are the results?

All these figures should be worked out for each state and revenue district. These are not impossible to work out. They are available for certain states like Andhra Pradesh.

This assumed added significance as the incumbent always claims that the rural and remote area services are being subsidized from the surplus in international and domestic long distance, and business subscribers in urban areas. All subsidies are transfers of income from one section to another and if these are not really quantified and their imagined benefits to the recipients not identified, the subsidies are economically and socially inefficient.

Universal Service or Universal Access?

The term "universal service" was, for the first time, used by Theodore N Wail of AT&T, when the then government of the US was seriously contemplating an anti-trust action against it—including takeover of the company by the government.

The meaning of universal service at that time was not that every home must have a telephone but that the telephone service must be geographically universal i.e. all population centers must have telephone service.

Over time, especially since the 1960s, universal service has come to acquire a different meaning, associating itself with telephone ownership and not access to a telephone. Today, many define universal service thus: more than 90 percent of homes must have a telephone.

It is time to consider the original meaning, as that is what is more relevant for India. Universal access is socially desirable as the benefits of science, technology and telecommunications are extended to whosoever wants them, without much effort, and affordable, whenever needed. There are various mechanisms to affect universal access, the one most widely prevalent and accepted, especially in all the under-telephoned areas in the country, is a public telephone. India has been doing extremely well in this regard. We have already achieved universal access in almost all the urban areas, wherein we have more than 500,000 public telephones and no one has to walk more than 500 meters to find a public telephone. If a public telephone is also put in every village, we will have achieved geographically universal access in the entire Indian territory. Of our 600,000 villages, we have already covered more than 350,000 villages with public telephones. This is not a mean achievement. The rest could be covered within two years by recourse to very imaginative methods involving both policy, managerial and technology choices.

In India, universal service (90 percent of homes having a telephone) is neither a warranted goal at this stage of our economic status, nor is it wanted and nor is it easy. Of about 28 million main lines, maybe about 15 million (7.5 percent of the total 200 million homes) are in homes.

In the US, it is less than 2 percent of the total number of homes that receive subsidized telephone service. 90 percent helping 10 percent of the public to be connected to the telephone network, is painless and sensible but the reverse is not.

The revenue from 15 million Indian home subscribers and roughly as many non-residential subscribers together cannot be expected to contribute for putting a telephone in the remaining 92.5 percent of homes.