A thing of the past

Indian babudom can be strange. There are times when one would argue in their favour, saying they deliver despite varied pressure groups.
Sometimes, one's defence has been that in a fast changing world, they are bound to commit errors, but show the ability to learn quickly. However, its recent act of banning the use of Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or Internet telephony is hard to understand.
It is a retrograde step and points to their inability to understand the picture in its entirety when it comes to techno-logy, specially that pertaining to telecommunications.
The move, specifically aimed at BPOs and call centres for now, is particularly short-sighted and targets popular applications such as Skype, Net2Phone and Dialpad. This means that the low-cost converged option of voice and data that these offered is being sought to be curbed.
If India is known as the world's back-office hub, it is, among others, also due to the cost advantage factor. The converged option discussed above, helped keep the BPOs' operational and capital costs low.
At a time when the BPO industry is facing increasing hostility from all over for snatching their jobs, this deliberate knock, that too from the government that is supposed to offer support, was not expected.
How often will government lose sense of the fact that in this march of technology, these knee-jerk reactions don't work? We only have to jog the brain a little to recall that regulatory and policy hurdles cannot succeed in arresting the march of technology.
In the early 1990s the policy mandarins, in all their wisdom, anointed GSM as the technology for mobiles.
Making mobiles technology-specific meant that better and faster technologies that came into being were kept at bay for a considerable time before pressure groups prevailed, not necessarily in the right manner though, and allowed CDMA in.
Ultimately the outcome was that as soon as regulation ceased to create hurdles and limited mobility gave way to full mobility, the country's mobile penetration zoomed.
One only needs to look at the potential of VoIP in other areas. We proudly proclaim ourselves as the fastest growing mobile market in the world, having overtaken even China.
And we have also seen the exploding growth from a tele-density of less than 1 per cent, just a decade ago, to over 12 per cent now. However, even as we celebrate, another fact stares at us: The euphoria called telecom boom has completely bypassed the country's rural areas.
Why? One, because most operators reneged on their connectivity pledge and two, because a spineless government could not force the operators, who had made the promise in the first place, to deliver. A series of policy changes later ensured that all of them have made merry, even as rural areas have suffered.
The Economic Times recently carried a story on how the poor pay 200 per cent more for mobile calls. The article said that 16 million subscribers of lifetime validity schemes from varied operators pay almost thrice the average cost of call.
The fact that rural areas are the key to any economy's real growth can never be doubted, and the fact was demonstrated by Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh.
He spelt out how the Grameen Phone scheme became a huge success, specially for rural women and became a "coveted enterprise for Grameen borrowers.
Telephone ladies quickly learned and innovated the ropes of the telephone business, and it has become the quickest way to get out of poverty and to earn social respectability".
What has that got to do with VoIP? Even as government struggles to bring telephony to rural areas, it is clear that one of the most economical ways to move forward on this count would have been VoIP.
The recent growth in WiMAX (which makes wireless Internet access widely available) is a case in point. All over the world, there is increasing reliance on this technology to bring connectivity quickly.
In the US, Sprint has recently committed a whopping $3 billion to build a WiMAX network using Motorola, Intel and Samsung. Roll-out of such a huge quantum means there would be economies of scale and costs would come down further.
The point is that the way technology is changing, call rates would continue to go South. It is quite possible that you would be paying more for a call next door than an overseas call. The differentiator in this emerging context would be value-added services.
If that be the case, why is government trying to regulate the march of technology? It will only make things more uncompetitive.One can understand that some of the government's moves are made to safeguard existing players who have invested thousands of crores to build their networks.
But that certainly should not and cannot translate into shielding these operators from technological advances. Ultimately, the government has to play saviour to the common man too, and not operators alone.
And once we realise that, there will be the real growth, and not only in the bottomlines of a few operators.