Driving Future Of Mobile Communication In India

TSDSI has brought India on the world’s standards map with a potential of altering the landscape of the telecom sector in the next 25 years

- Abhay Karandikar

Since the first cellular phone call was made in India on 31 July 1995, the country has witnessed tremendous growth in the telecom sector. From less than 15 million telecom subscribers in 1995, today we have over a billion subscribers with an overall teledensity of 88%. This has been made possible primarily due to an exponential growth in cellular mobile communications supported by a liberalized market with regulatory reforms. While we have about 1.1 billion mobile subscribers, the number of wireline subscribers remains only 20 million. Despite this spectacular growth, where the urban teledensity has crossed 100%, the rural teledensity is still 58% as of this writing. Moreover, the number of broadband subscribers is about 700 Million. Undoubtedly, rural connectivity and broadband penetration will be the key focus areas for the next decade for achieving nationwide digital empowerment.

I have been fortunate to be associated with telecom research, technology development, policy and regulatory changes in the country for the last 25 years and would like to recapitulate my experiences and involvement in establishing Telecom Standards Development India (TSDSI) which brought India on the world’s standards map with a potential of altering the landscape of the telecom sector in the next 25 years.