India became an independent country more than 50 years ago,yet more than 3,60,000 villages do not have a telephone connection. Thisconstitutes nearly 50 percent of the villages in India. On the one hand we saythat India lives in its villages. 50 percent is out of the mainstream of Indiansociety. This has been so because DoT, the only agency providing the connectionhas not found it economically viable. As long as village telephony is consideredan economic activity, the end goal of providing a telephone to every villagewill remain a dream. It has to be looked upon as a social obligation by theGovernment. All studies have proved that one percent increase in tele-densityhas resulted in a three percent growth of GDP.

To a large extent our poor rate of growth can be attributedto a poor tele-density. The sceptics will argue that when a country does nothave resources to meet the basic needs like potable water, electricity and soon, from where will the money come for this luxury? The answer is that villagetelephony must be viewed as a necessity like health care. Has any one wonderedwhy doctors, teachers and other professionals do not want to go to villages,despite the clean air, no pollution, peace and tranquility? The reason is thatthey do not want to be totally cut off from the rest of the world. I can statewith certainty that those villages, which have telephones, will have regularteachers, better health care and
so on.

The approach to village telephony has to be totally differentfrom the one followed for extending basic services by the DoT so far. Newtechnology, lighter equipment, with very low power consumption now makes itpossible to engineer low capacity systems which provide one or two voicechannels plus a data circuit. A PCO could be set up at the village level, whichwould provide Internet connectivity also.

Existing Scenario

The DoT had introduced the MARR system in the early ninetiesto provide village telephony. However the system did not perform for variousreasons:

• The equipment at the village end needed expert handling; i.e. it was more like a radio with a telephone handset. Certain tuning of the radio was involved.

• It was an analogue system and was prone to interference; as a result the quality of voice was not good.

• Only one connection was available at the village.

• The system worked on the basis of sharing a radio channel between a number of villages, and thus availability was restricted.

• The project was an experiment and the service was free. When the equipment failed to work the project was abandoned as far as that village was concerned. The equipment never came back duly repaired. It is believed that a large number of such systems are lying in DoT warehouses across the country.