The Anna Way

It's the 12th day of Anna's fast and the political class is gearing toward introduction of Jan Lokpal Bill in the parliament. The parliamentarians are planning to debate Jan Lokpal Bill and other related bills that will make an attempt to weed out large-scale corruption from government establishments at all levels. It has taken almost 42 years for this event to happen, thanks to Anna Hazare's strong will that has forced the government to bring an anti-corruption bill.

It seems the Anna movement has a long way to go before the bill comes up, but there are many learnings that can be adopted by policy makers (bureaucrats and politicians) to make future of Indian communications look rosy.

First, the ministry and the policy makers need to be more accountable. All the PSUs under Ministry of Communications be it MTNL, BSNL, ITI, C-DoT, and others should show increase in topline and bottomline. It is very difficult to imagine that private companies are growing whereas public sector companies are going down. It's time they correct their acts and start delivering. In case they are unable to deliver, the top management along with bureaucrats and political establishment should own responsibility. Not only this, the focus should be also on time-bound completion of projects so that there is no scope of cost escalation and technology obsolescence. For example, broadband connectivity to all gram panchayats is planned for completion by the end of 2012, but till date the project has not started. This is not the only project, but there are umpteen projects that have not been completed on time.

Second, transparency will definitely help the telecom industry to come out from its shell. The whole mess that was created by Raja and his team was due to lack of transparency. So, a lot of cleaning needs to be done. Not only this, even procurement of products through tenders is delayed due to lack of transparency that leads to court cases. With transparency, one can expect timely completion of project and also one can check cost overrun by procuring products on time.

Third, the power of big idea cannot be underestimated. If one recalls, mobile sector in the country grew by leaps and bounds only when CPP was abolished and the rates were reduced to a reasonable level. Once this happened, the cellular industry had a good growth for a large time frame say in the last 4-5 years. In future, the telecom industry needs one big idea for broadband industry which has still not performed as per expectation and is presently at 12 million lines. So, a big idea followed by a good ecosystem will definitely take broadband penetration to new heights and also help the country to prosper fast.

All these learnings will definitely help the industry to move forward and give telecom a new lease of life.

Pravin Prashant

pravinp@cybermedia.co.in