Someone who has even seen (forget about reading) the Final Draft Report of the Sub-Group on Convergence headed by Fali S Nariman, is bound to wonder how even a highly hyped phenomenon like convergence could be made to sound so sarkari.

But be prepared for more. Because, if the Government accepts what the report suggests it to do (and chances are that it will), you will soon have to go through more such sarkari stuff—bills, amendments, terms of reference and so on.

Lest you should start worrying, there is another side to the story. Though the structure and language of the Report might be very sarkari, the underlying tone is surely not. Somewhere hidden within those 100-plus pages of definitions and clarifications, histories of governmental work and classifications, are suggestions for regulatory changes and steps that can be called truly radical by any international standards. But more of that later.

What one fails to understand is what (and/or who) stopped the Government from publicizing (read marketing) the report?

Shyamal Ghosh, DoT secretary, told one of the reporters of V&D recently that all the answers to his questions were actually in the Report, which is available on the Internet. We did manage to get the Report after some frantic search, but from ICICI’s (not from DoT’s/MIT’s/NIC’s or any of the other government departments concerned) web site through an external search engine. And there was not even a link to it from the CII’S home page. We almost began to doubt our Internet searching skills, but were saved by most of the top executives who also asked us for the URL of the Report! They had apparently known only about the existence of the Report but had not seen it. Only in October did ASSOCHAM organize a discussion forum on the Report.

Government’s indifference is nothing new, but what really made matters worse was that the mainstream media chose to ignore the report and its content! "May be people feel there is not much in it to read, " quipped Fali S Nariman, the main protagonist of the Report.

The remark did little to hide the Government’s failure to publicize the Report. And this old mindset is the first block in the implementation process. Gone are the days when government policies did not need marketing. Today, success in policy making, like product selling, comes more from marketing than anything else. Remember Reed Hundt, the charismatic erstwhile FCC chairman, who marketed an idea called "spectrum auctioning" so well that it changed the course of mobile communications throughout the world?