Centre for Internet and Society

Railway Takeaways for Digital India

Shyam Ponappa — 2015-04-10T13:37:45Z

Extending the approach of the Railway Budget to telecommunications and broadband. For the first time since the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) formed the government last year, we have something more than grand aspirational statements to go by.

The Op-ed was published in the Business Standard on March 4, 2015 and mirrored on Organizing India Blogspot on March 5, 2015.

Last week's Railway Budget is the first indicator of possibly better days, after all the rhetoric. Perhaps the reservations of some former railway ministers and excoriating comments such as "dreams without substance" have a basis. But in my reckoning, there's a sense of coming to grips with reality based on a rational evaluation, and a systematic approach through problem solving. This was backstopped by a finely balanced Union Budget that supports infrastructure and growth.

Going forward, we need more explicit articulation of detailed steps for execution and inter-sectoral linkages, which would be highly beneficial for the overall economy as well as for the Railways. For example, on how aspects of the Budget relate to stalled and stranded power generation, how these relate to electricity transmission and distribution, and the resolution of non-performing assets (NPAs) of banks. Additionally, the financial discipline of cash flows could be extended to substantially benefit other sectors. As for the financing relating to the Railways, the expectation that the details will be worked out needs to be met soon to establish credibility.

Setting aside all normative criticism, however, what's most important now is that the Railways delivers on this Budget. This will require more resolute coordination and emphasis on implementation than in the past, for example, in contrast to the poor implementation of the Electricity Act of 2003, a good piece of legislation that's unfulfilled.

Extending the approach of realistic goals with explicit action plans and execution could benefit other areas of the economy and infrastructure. The elements include:

Toning down the rhetoric, avoiding grandiose statements and instead, defining realistic objectives. It may be argued that realism and understatement are difficult, even counterproductive, when political rivals indulge in a race to the bottom in terms of giveaways. This is true of state elections, as in Delhi, and at the national level, in the confusing if not irresponsible allocation of substantial funds to the debatable benefits of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The difficulty is that it needs responsible voters to act against opportunistic populism to discourage such gaming strategies in favour of better governance, but it will also need credible candidates with sound party positions and sustainable policies.
A willingness to depart radically from past practices for better results. For instance, no new trains were announced in this year's Railway Budget, a major, responsible departure from an otherwise pernicious customary indulgence.
An effort to develop a user-centric, outward-oriented strategy for improving services. This is the opposite of a department- or ministry-centric approach, emphasising the "scheme"-driven perspective of the department/agency for limited, piece-meal targets, as against an overall system in the interests of users.

Extending these principles to Digital India

Consider how these might apply to another flagship concept - Digital India - in telecommunications and broadband. Networks and their elements, including projects like the National Optic Fibre Network, would be treated as integral components - stepping stones or links in a chain, and not the ends in themselves - of a systemic delivery process for what users need: a broadband connection to the internet, which becomes the goal. In addition to the access to general information, telecommuting, entertainment and e-commerce through the internet, additional content relating to government, educational and health services would also need to be made available over time. Viewed from this perspective, the requirement changes from achieving targets for the installation of "x" km of fibre or "y" pieces of customer equipment, or the auction of "z" megahertz of spectrum, some of which may be stranded or not working, to achieving targets for end-to-end connectivity with high-speed access to the internet at reasonable prices for the population of users. A classic example of dysfunctional targets was the subscriber-based spectrum allocation rule, which sought to cram the most users on the least spectrum - akin to stuffing a highway with vehicles, instead of getting them to their destination.

From this vantage, it becomes clear that policies should facilitate users' access and connectivity to the internet. Therefore, systems and methods for access through elements that provide connectivity - spectrum, fibre-optic cable, coaxial cable, or "twisted-pairs" for ADSL - must be devised in an integrated manner and made available at low cost.

Networks are useful only if they are accessible to end-users. Here's where the analogy of no new trains applies: for broadband, it could mean giving up spectrum auctions that fragment delivery capacity while draining away potential capital that could be invested instead in networks. Bundling spectrum and other last-mile access technologies with stranded backbone networks seems the obvious way to reach end-users. Where fibre can't be laid and maintained economically, the intermediate linkage over several kilometres could be through reasonably priced wireless, with technologies such as microwave links in the six-gigahertz, 11-GHz, 18-GHz bands and so on, local multipoint distribution systems in the 28-32-GHz bands, TV white space (unused broadcast spectrum, for example, in the 600-MHz band), satellites, or 4G (LTE). For India with its present state of infrastructure, governments must choose to favour delivery to end-users, collecting tolls and taxes at the back end, after the revenues and profits are made. This is how mobile telephony succeeded in India. Broadband can succeed in the same way.

Another concept applicable from the Railways (and roads) is common-carrier access: all trains have access to common rail networks, just as all licensed vehicles have access to road networks, with additional tariffs for high-speed links like expressways or for captive rail. This is the way to achieve Digital India quickly, by adopting common-carrier principles on payment, whereby people in cities as well as the countryside can study, telecommute and conference for work anywhere, get health care, information and entertainment, sell their produce and artefacts, vote, and access government services.

The wisdom of the Railway Budget approach needs to extend to Digital India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-opinion-article-shyam-ponappa-march-4-2015-railway-takeaways-for-digital-india

Pushing the buttons for social change

radha — 2011-04-02T15:09:10Z

IMMENSE POTENTIAL: With its myriad applications, a mobile phone can be used as an instrument of social change. Meet on how mobile technology can be a power tool to this end - An article in The Hindu on 01st September 2009

BANGALORE: We have all seen the popular television advertisement that claims that mobile phone technology can be much more than a communication device and be used as a powerful tool for social change.

Here is a platform that brings together technology enthusiasts and non-governmental organisations, working in various social sectors, to drive this change.

The one-day camp, Mobile Tech 4 Social Change, to be held on September 4, aims at exploring the power of mobile technology to advance social change goals.

Organised by the Centre for Internet and Studies, in collaboration with Women’s Learning Partnership, Mobile Monday and Mobile Active, it will include informative and interactive sessions on the subject.

It will be held from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Mother Tekla Auditorium on Brunton Road.

Participating NGOs will discuss problems and different ways to use, deploy, develop and promote mobile technology in health, advocacy, economic development, environment, human rights, and citizen media to name a few areas.

According to the Cellular Operators’ Association of India, there has been a growth in the number of subscribers by 1.86 per cent in July 2009 in the metros alone.

“A report on the impact of mobile phones in India reveals that Indian States with high mobile penetration can be expected to grow faster than those with lower mobile penetration rates, namely, 1.2 percentage points for every 10 per cent increase in the penetration rate.

This conference is a step in understanding how this can be taken forward,” says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Studies. Participants for Mobile Tech 4 Social Change bar camps will include nonprofits, mobile applications developers, researchers, donors, intermediary organisations, and mobile operators.

While NGOs can gain information on various mobile applications and collaborate with those working in the core field of mobile technologies, enterprises can align their social responsibilities and use this potentially powerful medium.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/pushing-the-buttons-for-social-change

Pushing Buttons

radha — 2011-04-02T13:56:28Z

The coolest device of the decade – From brick-sized to size zero, the cell phone changed our lives forever – an article by Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, 1st Jan, 2010.

Bangalore: Today, it no longer makes news to see your neighbourhood vegetable vendor taking orders on his mobile phone, or for that matter a mason at work as he chatters away on his cellphone.

A decade ago this was unthinkable.

The 10 years which have gone by have found a great leveller in technology, the cell phone being the most ubiquitous of them all. Cellphones crossed over from overpriced, shoebox-sized, upper-class accessory to an affordable easy-to-use gadget for staying connected, getting entertained and, for many, even a way of life. The long queues outside the PCO booth and scrambling for those elusive one-rupee coins is now history. The cellphone is literally in every hand. As of November 2009, India, with the world’s second largest population, registered 506.4 million cellphone connections, (543 million, including landlines), second only to China. Which means half our population has the device.

Tharoor’s take

Twitter-politician Shashi Tharoor regaled the audience at a recent conference, TED India, about this story of a coconut vendor in his home state of Kerala. He wanted a tender coconut and called a vendor he knew, only to discover the man was high up on a coconut palm, still connected to his cellphone!

Old timers still talk about the miles of red tape and the years it took to get a basic landline connection.

So while globally the noughties were about crowdsourcing, micro and macro blogging, e-books, file sharing or the “cloud”, in India, even the internet is only barely there. With a staggeringly low penetration, pegged at around seven to eight percent (over 80 million), the web is not a patch on the omnipresent cellphone.

The next decade

Sunil Abraham, Director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, insists that the cellphone will also define the decade that begins today. And like that clever advertisement, text-to-voice and voice recognition can and will be big in providing access to the unlettered, disabled and forgotten sections, he explains.

“Data services and geographic positioning services (GPS) show great promise in connecting the poor to the state and the market,” he said.

On a more futuristic, and indulgent note, Mr. Abraham says micro-projection systems that will work on walls and mobiles will forefront projects in those rural areas with limited or no electricity. This may be the only way to reach the unbanked with mainstream or community currencies, he adds.

Link to the original article

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/pushing-buttons

Public Debate on 'Differential Pricing': Series 3

vidushi — 2016-01-28T13:53:12Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, in association with ICRIER and the Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai, is pleased to announce “A Series of Public Debates on Differential Pricing” in the cities of Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi. The third public debate will be held at India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road near Air Force Bal Bharti School, New Delhi on February 5, 2016.

In light of the recent consultation paper released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the objective of these debates will be to deconstruct the issue of differential pricing through a discussion on the variety of views this subject has attracted. Speakers will also discuss possible implications of differential pricing policy on questions of access, diversity, competition and entrepreneurship.

Each debate will comprise three rounds. In the first round, speakers will present the body of their arguments over 10 minutes each. The second round will be a rebuttal round, with each speaker being given 5 minutes. The third and final round will see the floor being opened to the audience who will engage the speakers with comments and questions.

Download the Invite

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/public-debate-on-differential-pricing-series-3

Public Debate on 'Differential Pricing': Series 2

vidushi — 2016-01-28T13:51:06Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, in association with ICRIER and the Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai, is pleased to announce “A Series of Public Debates on Differential Pricing” in the cities of Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi. The second public debate will be held at Pherozeshah Mehta Bhavan, Vidyanagari, Kalina, Mumbai on February 3, 2016.

Download the Invite

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/public-debate-on-differential-pricing-series-2

Public Debate on 'Differential Pricing': Series 1

vidushi — 2016-01-27T13:51:06Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, in association with ICRIER and the Department of Civics and Politics, University of Mumbai, is pleased to announce “A Series of Public Debates on Differential Pricing” in the cities of Bangalore, Mumbai and New Delhi. The first public debate will be held at the Centre for Internet & Society office in Bangalore on February 1, 2016.

Download the Invite

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/a-series-of-public-debates-on-differential-pricing-series-1

Project Loon

praskrishna — 2015-03-09T16:17:41Z

Billions of people could get online for the first time thanks to helium balloons that Google will soon send over many places cell towers don’t reach.

The article published in MIT Technology Review quotes Sunil Abraham.

You climb 170 steps up a series of dusty wooden ladders to reach the top of Hangar Two at Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California. The vast, dimly lit shed was built in 1942 to house airships during a war that saw the U.S. grow into a technological superpower. A perch high in the rafters is the best way to appreciate the strangeness of something in the works at Google—a part of the latest incarnation of American technical dominance.

On the floor far below are Google employees who look tiny as they tend to a pair of balloons, 15 meters across, that resemble giant white pumpkins. Google has launched hundreds of these balloons into the sky, lofted by helium. At this moment, a couple of dozen float over the Southern Hemisphere at an altitude of around 20 kilometers, in the rarely visited stratosphere—nearly twice the height of commercial airplanes. Each balloon supports a boxy gondola stuffed with solar-powered electronics. They make a radio link to a telecommunications network on the ground and beam down high-speed cellular Internet coverage to smartphones and other devices. It’s known as Project Loon, a name chosen for its association with both flight and insanity.

Google says these balloons can deliver widespread economic and social benefits by bringing Internet access to the 60 percent of the world’s people who don’t have it. Many of those 4.3 billion people live in rural places where telecommunications companies haven’t found it worthwhile to build cell towers or other infrastructure. After working for three years and flying balloons for more than three million kilometers, Google says Loon balloons are almost ready to step in.

It is odd for a large public company to build out infrastructure aimed at helping the world’s poorest people. But in addition to Google’s professed desires to help the world, the economics of ad-supported Web businesses give the company other reasons to think big. It’s hard to find new customers in Internet markets such as the United States. Getting billions more people online would provide a valuable new supply of eyeballs and personal data for ad targeting. That’s one reason Project Loon will have competition: in 2014 Facebook bought a company that makes solar-powered drones so it can start its own airborne Internet project.

Google’s planet-scale social-engineering project is much further along. In tests with major cellular carriers, the balloons have provided high-speed connections to people in isolated parts of Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. Mike Cassidy, Project Loon’s leader, says the technology is now sufficiently cheap and reliable for Google to start planning how to roll it out. By the end of 2015, he wants to have enough balloons in the air to test nearly continuous service in several parts of the Southern Hemisphere. Commercial deployment would follow: Google expects cellular providers to rent access to the balloons to expand their networks. Then the number of people in the world who still lack Internet access should start to shrink, fast.

Balloon revolution

“HARMLESS SCIENCE EXPERIMENT.” That’s what was written on the boxes carried by the balloons that the secretive Google X lab began to launch over California’s Central Valley in 2012, along with a phone number and the promise of a reward for safe return. Inside the boxes was a modified office Wi-Fi router. The balloons were made by two seamsters hired from the fashion industry, from supplies bought at hardware stores.

Project Loon is now much less like a science project. In 2013, Google began working with a balloon manufacturer, Raven Aerostar, which expanded a factory and opened another to make the inflatable “envelope” for the balloons. That June, Google revealed the existence of the project and described its first small-scale field trials, in which Loon balloons provided Internet service to people in a rural area of New Zealand. In 2014, Project Loon focused on turning a functional but unwieldy prototype into technology that’s ready to expand the world’s communication networks.

Loon’s leaders planned to buy their own space on the radio spectrum so their balloons could operate independently of existing wireless networks. But Google CEO Larry Page nixed that idea and said the balloons should instead be leased to wireless carriers, who could use the chunks of the airwaves they already own and put up ground antennas to link the balloons into their networks. That saved Google from spending billions on spectrum licenses and turned potential competitors into allies. “Nearly every telco we talk to wants to do it,” says Cassidy.

Project Loon aims to change the economics of Internet access

Google has also made major improvements to its stratospheric craft. One of the most significant was developing a way to accurately pilot balloons across thousands of miles without any form of propulsion. The stratosphere, which typically is used only by weather balloons and spy planes, is safely above clouds, storms, and commercial flights. But it has strong winds, sometimes exceeding 300 kilometers per hour. Providing reliable wireless service means being able to guarantee that there will always be a balloon within 40 kilometers.

Google solved that aviation problem by turning it into a computer problem. Winds blow in different directions and at different speeds in different layers of the stratosphere. Loon balloons exploit that by changing altitude. As a smaller balloon inside the main one inflates or deflates, they can rise or fall to seek out the winds that will send them where Google wants them to go. It’s all directed by software in a Google data center that incorporates wind forecasts from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into a simulation of stratospheric airflow. “The idea is to find a way through the maze of the winds,” says Johan Mathe, a software engineer working on Loon’s navigation system. A fleet of balloons can be coördinated that way to ensure there is always one over any particular area.

The first version of this system sent new commands to Loon balloons once a day. It could find a way for a balloon launched over New Zealand, for example, to dawdle over land until prevailing winds pushed it east and over the Pacific Ocean. Then it would have the balloon ride the fastest winds possible for the 9,000-kilometer trip east to Chile. But that system could only get balloons within hundreds of kilometers of their intended target. For tests of Internet service in New Zealand and elsewhere, the company had to cheat, launching Loon balloons nearby to make sure they would be overhead. In late 2014, Google upgraded its balloon navigation system to give balloons fresh orders as frequently as every 15 minutes. They can now be steered with impressive accuracy over intercontinental distances. In early 2015, a balloon traveled 10,000 kilometers and got within 500 meters of its desired cell tower.

Google has also had to figure out how to make the balloons sturdier, so they can spend more time in the stratosphere. The longer they stay up, the lower the cost of operating the network. However, weight considerations mean a balloon’s envelope must be delicate. Made from polyethylene plastic with the feel of a heavy-weight trash bag, the material is easily pierced with a fingertip, and a stray grain of grit in the factory can make a pinprick-size hole that will bring a balloon back to earth after less than two weeks.

Preventing those leaks is the work of a squad inside Project Loon that has doggedly chased down every possible cause and come up with preventive measures. These researchers have studied balloons retrieved from the stratosphere, pored over video footage of others inflated to bursting on the ground, and developed a “leak sniffer” to find tiny holes by detecting helium. The leak squad’s findings have led to changes in the design of the balloon envelope, fluffier socks for factory workers who must step on the envelopes during production, and new machines to automate some manufacturing steps. Altogether, Google has introduced the first major changes the balloon industry has seen in decades, says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, who oversees manufacturing for Project Loon and previously worked on Apple’s manufacturing operations. Those changes have paid off. In the summer of 2013, Loon balloons lasted only eight days before having to be brought down, says Krishnaswamy. Today balloons last on average over 100 days, with most exceeding that time in flight; a handful last as long as 130 days.

Google has also made many improvements to the design of the Loon balloons’ payloads and electronics. But it still has problems left to solve. For example, Google needs to perfect a way of making radio or laser connections between balloons, so that they can pass data along in an aerial chain to connect areas far from any ground station.

But Cassidy says Project Loon’s technology is already at a point where stratospheric Internet service can be tested at a global scale. In 2015 he aims to evaluate “quasi-continuous” service along a thin ribbon around the Southern Hemisphere. That ribbon is mostly ocean, but it will require a fleet of more than 100 Loon balloons circling the globe, says Cassidy. “Maybe 90 percent of the time,” he says, “people in that ring will have at least one balloon overhead and be able to use it.”

Good signals

“It was just for some minutes, but it was wonderful,” says Silvana Pereira, a school principal in a rural area of northeastern Brazil. She’s thinking back to an unusual geography class last summer in which pupils at Linoca Gayoso Castelo Branco School could use the Internet thanks to a Loon balloon drifting, invisibly, high overhead. Internet service is nonexistent in the area, but that day’s lesson on Portugal was enhanced by Wikipedia and online maps. “They were so involved that the 45 minutes of a regular class wouldn’t be enough to satisfy their demand for knowledge,” says Pereira.

Her school is only around 100 kilometers from a metro area of more than one million people, but its location is too poor and sparsely populated for Brazil’s wireless carriers to invest in Internet infrastructure. Google’s goal is for Project Loon to change those economics. It should be possible to operate one Loon balloon for just hundreds of dollars per day, Cassidy says, and each one should be able to serve a few thousand connections at any time. The company won’t reveal how much it is spending to set all this up, or even how many people work on the project.

Cassidy is also confident that his balloons will be able to hold their own against Internet delivered by drones (both Google and Facebook are working on that) or satellites (an idea being pursued by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk). Those projects are less far along than Loon, and it’s expensive to build and power drones or launch satellites. “For quite some time, balloons will have a big cost advantage,” Cassidy says. Nevertheless, Google might be hedging its bets with more than just drones: in January it invested $900 million in SpaceX.

Technology is not the only thing keeping 4.3 billion people offline, though. For example, policies in India mandate that telecom companies provide coverage to poor as well as rich areas, but the government hasn’t enforced the rules, says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bangalore. He is also wary of Project Loon because of the way Google and other Western Internet companies have operated in developing countries in recent years. They have cut deals with telecoms in India and other countries to make it free to access their websites, disadvantaging local competitors. “Anyone coming with deep pockets and new technology I would welcome,” he says, but he adds that governments should fix up their patchy regulatory regimes first to ensure that everyone—not just Google and its partners—really does benefit.

Those working on Project Loon are confident the public good will be served. They seem as motivated by a desire to make people’s lives better as by Loon’s outlandish technology. Cassidy’s voice wavers with emotion when he thinks back to seeing the delight of Pereira’s pupils during their Internet-enabled geography lesson. “This is a way of changing the world,” he says.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/news/mit-technology-review-february-18-2015-project-loon

Prioritizing Communications & Energy

Shyam Ponappa — 2013-04-28T07:01:44Z

After curbing unproductive expenditure and imports, we must focus on developing communications and energy.

Shyam Ponappa's article was published in the Business Standard on April 4, 2013 and mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot.

A difficult aspect of addressing our economy, apart from necessary firefighting, is that of prioritisation, whether it is through organisation (or reorganisation), management and execution, or all these combined with policy reforms. With infrastructure growing for years at only about half the rate that gross domestic product has, crisis and turmoil are inevitable without systemic remedies. How should the authorities address the many deficiencies if our need is comprehensive, integrated improvement in systems?

Prerequisite: control expenses

First, a caveat: meta-processes such as managing cash flows and the balance of imports to exports, our most urgent problems, must be dealt with as a prerequisite. Giving out more cash than receipts has to stop. Many countries have come to grief on welfare spending before they could afford it, and no one has found a magical way out. India is not likely to find one either, so we do have to end this unsustainable indulgence. Second, hard as it is, without investment in capacity augmentation and system building, we cannot escape the cycle of deficiencies and crises. If we can get help from the International Monetary Fund now, that's what we should seek, and use it judiciously.

Communications and energy

Communications is a compelling priority, because of the bang for the buck it provides, compounded by correcting past mistakes. Other infrastructure deficiencies, while equally critical or even more so - think energy, water, sanitation and transportation - require much more by way of capital, human resources, and organisation, and generally do not yield as much return as quickly. Also, other sectors often require co-ordinated action by state and local governments in concert with the central government.

There are areas that need central policy correctives, too. For energy, an urgent requirement is a solar energy policy to induce the spread of equipment. The policy should include tax rebates and the concept of Net Energy Metering, as in California, that facilitates selling excess power to the grid. In the US, for instance, of the new capacity commissioned in 2012, nearly half was from renewable energy - of which 40 per cent was from wind, with a substantial share from solar. We have to find a balance between the inducements that led to overbuilding in Spain and our own backward-leaning policies, as we have abundant sunshine that is not adequately used as well as high energy imports. Italy, Spain and Australia are apparently close to price parity in solar and conventional fuels; perhaps there's scope for selective adaptation of some of their policies.

The difficulty with communications alone, however, is evident from the growth of mobile telephony in India. The proliferation of networks and equipment with the need for standby generation because of unreliable grid power has resulted in:

higher oil imports for diesel for generating electricity;

a multiplicity of networks, towers and radio transmission equipment, with substantial investments in spectrum, resulting in a huge drain on capital, in addition to the environmental impact of excessive materials used, high electromagnetic radiation, and a blight on the urban landscape.

Energy for communications
According to a recent statement in Parliament, the annual diesel consumption in 585,000 towers is estimated at over five billion litres. This underscores the need to develop our own approach to the whole range of requirements, from network architecture and organisation to equipment, even as we re-evaluate how to provide countrywide broadband access. The existing paradigms will result in escalating capital cost, operating expenses, and fuel import patterns that are unsustainable.

Our approach to voice and data communications itself has to evolve. In a way, communications services are an enabler and force-multiplier for other infrastructure, providing a framework and facilitation for structured development. Also, if a systematic approach that serves our needs evolves for this sector, it could provide a template for integrated, goal-directed development of other sectors, starting with the verticals to deliver reliable power to users.

This undertaking is especially complex in India because of our fragmented organisational structure, with no apparent co-ordination mechanism. Another aspect of the problem is reflected in this quotation from a McKinsey report: “Delays in building ‘hard’ infrastructure often stem from a lack of ‘soft’ infrastructure, such as educated, skilled workers with project-management capabilities.”* There is also a lack of effective institutions and processes for the organisation and management of human and material resources. For instance, fuels such as coal and oil are under different ministries, power generation and distribution; alternative energy and nuclear energy are all separate ministries, as are the railways that transport coal; while another ministry evaluates the environmental impact. Nothing is going to work if each one acts independently without co-ordinating with the others. It’s as though we have not understood the importance of organisation and co-ordination to achieve results, or are consciously ignoring this in an opportunistic free-for-all.

Finding our own way

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt observed recently that India lagged behind the rest of the world in adopting the Web services model and in harnessing the power of the internet, attributing this to failure to invest in high-speed networks, perhaps through complacency because of a strong IT sector. While this could be interpreted as self-serving, our needs would be very well served if the authorities focused on correcting this through policies that induce private sector investment in networks and service delivery, in data centres, and in terrestrial links to supplement our submarine cables. In communications, as in other sectors, we have to fashion our own way because cut-and-paste solutions won’t work, as the contexts are too different. We must explicitly address developing local data centres; terrestrial links with other countries, if feasible; our own designs for rural broadband including common facilities, with efficient, low-powered elements to the extent possible; use renewable energy; explore small-cell architecture in urban settings; and devise policies that facilitate investment in ubiquitous internet access, including spectrum reforms like allocating more bandwidth for Wi-Fi. It would be in our interest to focus on doing what it takes to achieve top-tier Web services in the next five to 10 years.

*“Can India lead the mobile-Internet revolution?”, Laxman Narasimhan, February 2011
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Digital_Marketing/Can_India_lead_the_mobile-Internet_revolution_2746

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-shyam-ponappa-april-4-2013-prioritizing-communications-energy

Predictability in Infrastructure

Shyam Ponappa — 2013-11-18T08:47:05Z

Systematic planning and execution can reduce the need for crisis management in infrastructure and manufacturing.

The article first appeared in the Business Standard on November 6, and was cross-posted in Organizing India Blogspot on November 10.

Problems related to projects in infrastructure and manufacturing are either predictable or unpredictable. For the type of problem that is more predictable, the "known known", we need to apply ourselves to facilitate productivity across sectors. An example of the unpredictable variety is in the developments dogging the erstwhile Dabhol project.

Until we plan and build infrastructure systematically, our current account deficit will continue to overshadow our economic prospects, including our ability to increase exports. The United States' easy-money policy is no more than a stopgap thumb-in-the-dyke. While unpredictable infrastructure problems require crisis management, no amount of clever short-term measures can substitute for timely, co-ordinated actions that are within the controllable domain. Whether it's power generation and distribution, telecommunications and broadband, the railways, or air travel, any form of infrastructure - apart from exceptions such as the Delhi Metro - suffers from our inability or unwillingness to plan and execute systematically.

The Unpredictable: Dabhol

Consider the continuing, unforeseen problems with the Dabhol project. This power plant with a separate liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal nearby is going through yet another crisis. The owner and operator is Ratnagiri Gas and Power Private Limited, owned by public sector units, the state and banks. This joint venture - between the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Gas Authority of India Ltd (GAIL), the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, and some banks - was constituted to pick up the pieces after Enron. Yet, the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (called MahaVitaran), after taking most of the plant's output, is significantly behind on payments. Second, after the drop in gas production by the supplier, Reliance Industries' KG D-6, gas supplies have been reduced and are now cut off. The plant has been running well below capacity because of limited gas supply since 2012. Imported gas prices are so high that the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd refuses to buy power at prices nearly double that of domestic gas, so the plant may have to be shut down.

There we have it: a potentially valuable asset providing a critical resource, electricity, with a substantial, untidy set of problems that have dragged on for a decade. It's ironic that desperately needed energy assets were shut down because the output was deemed too expensive at first and then restarted without the "rapacious" private sector - only to run short of fuel, with state payments in arrears, and now close to another shutdown. This kind of problem needs hard decisions like getting state entities to pay on time, and the capacity to devise creative solutions and co-ordinated execution to tide over the crisis in the long-term public interest. Unless we muster the resolve to deal with such unforeseen, unstructured problems through hard decisions, Dabhol will continue to sap national resources.

Yet, when Chandrababu Naidu as chief minister in Andhra Pradesh dared to attempt rational tariff increases in 2004, the electorate swept him aside for the populists, who gleefully reverted to unsustainable free electricity and other handouts. More recently, the Aam Aadmi Party's plank in Delhi's state elections included lower-priced electricity, triggering another unsustainable race to the bottom. But there is a public outcry against accepting hard decisions in governance - and a consequent political unwillingness to deal with them, or to display the leadership to create public awareness. Raucous public opinion is not a substitute for knowledgeable and informed inputs and judgement. Until we break out of this self-abasing, illogical spiral of seeking instant gratification or short-term gains over balanced, reasoned, deferred gratification, the race to the bottom will continue.

Predictable Infrastructure: Telecom, Power, Railways, Airlines…

There's the other kind of problem, the one that is amenable to forward-planning, but doesn't seem to get it. The kind that it is impossible to put in place without comprehensive, integrated planning and execution. The classic cases from the 1990s have been telecom and power.

In telecom, the recent emergence of three national operators with smaller, localised successes reaffirms the oligopolistic structure of this sector. Three operators account for 67 per cent of the market in India, 82 per cent in Brazil, 90 per cent in the US, and 98 per cent in the UK; in China, two operators have 99 per cent. If policymakers accept this principle regarding market structure, the refrain that more competition is always better can be jettisoned in favour of delivery and results, with the objectives of quality services at reasonable prices. Once the focus is on these objectives, the primacy of delivering services over collecting government revenues becomes apparent, except from narrow "fiscal deficit" considerations. The point is that planning and project management have to be done upfront to be effective, and are much less powerful when retrofitted to problematic situations, as in stranded power generation or telecom services.

However, even with the best of intentions and skills, there can be mistakes requiring course correction in predictable processes. A good example is South Korea's adoption of WiMAX and the attempted creation of their own standard, WiBro. While successful initially, it turned out to be inferior to a newer technology, LTE. What South Korea has done after evaluating its alternatives is to abandon WiBro in favour of LTE. This is the approach and capacity that we must strive to cultivate. To be unafraid to commit - but equally, unafraid to retract and change tack if and when a choice proves inappropriate.

By recommending reduced reserve prices in auctions, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has indicated for the first time that delivery and price may be acceptable as concomitant goals alongside government revenues. Meanwhile, the department of telecommunications is reportedly considering lower levies on operators, although insisting on higher reserve prices, perhaps because of the finance ministry and/or public opinion. What is unclear is how public opinion will react to the focus on delivery and price. Contrarily, it favours auctions of inputs like coal mines and spectrum, but lower tariffs for power and telecom/broadband; auctions will have the opposite effect. Populists are more likely to go with public opinion, instead of analysing and resolving logical contradictions.

Every situation need not result in a crisis and firefighting. Systematically addressing end-to-end processes beforehand with those involved and experts can help in the resolution of a large set of predictable processes in areas like infrastructure and manufacturing.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-november-10-2013-shyam-ponappa-predictability-in-infrastructure

Policies to Sustain India's Market

Shyam Ponappa — 2017-05-20T03:06:30Z

The question is whether policies can be better framed to harness the market potential. Why is so much investment flowing into India's securities markets?

The article published in the Business Standard on May 3, 2017 was also mirrored on Organizing India Blogspot on May 4, 2017.

Probably because of (a) India’s market size and (b) growth, despite all its inconsistencies and difficulties. Are higher price-earnings multiples desirable? Yes if they are sustained, because more capital is available for equivalent productivity; otherwise, no. The question is whether policies can be better framed to harness the market potential.

India’s large market with its headroom for prosperity seems propelled partly by its own momentum, and its stocks partly by liquidity. The net investment in mutual funds in 2016-17 of Rs 3.43 lakh crore was reportedly double the previous year, the highest in the last decade. Domestic investment in pure equity funds in the last two years exceeded foreign portfolio investment (FPI), because of lower FPI and higher domestic investment. Retail investors grew in the last three years from 28.6 million to 39.3 million. Other positive factors were a government with a strong mandate and falling oil prices.

Now, reasonable earnings from some large companies and rising global markets augur well, although earnings must improve broadly and a number of caveats remain. These relate to non-performing assets/loans (NPAs/NPLs), structural problems in sectors such as iron and steel, construction, power, telecom, transport, agriculture, continuing deficiencies in infrastructure and institutions, and in productivity. There are social pressures from divisive electioneering, a disturbing rise of exclusionary tendencies echoed globally, and government overreach. There are also self-induced crises because of inappropriate policies, as in telecom, unviable situations created by populism, or by judicial orders, as seen in telecom, coal and power. There could also be failure to improve productivity (by a third to 9 per cent, as during the growth years), or adverse external developments.

The room for improvement is epitomised by low per capita productivity. According to Bloomberg, the International Labour Organization’s output per worker for India in 2017 is 20 times lower than for Germany. Yet, expectations run high for India in reports from sources such as Euromonitor, the International Monetary Fund, London’s Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Euromonitor predicts India’s consumer market will be the third largest by 2030, ahead of Japan and Germany. Growth will be for products such as smartphones, automobiles, and durables such as TV sets, refrigerators and air conditioners. For instance, India is the third largest market for smartphones after China and the US. In automobiles, India is the fifth largest market with over 3.3 million cars sold in 2016 and continues to attract global manufacturers.

However, Euromonitor cautions against rising inequality with the Gini index rising from 39.9 per cent in 2011 to 41.6 per cent in 2016 and estimated at 43.4 per cent by 2030. The CEBR estimates that by 2028, India’s gross domestic product will be the third largest after China and the US. PwC forecasts that in 2050, India will be the second largest economy (in purchasing power parity) after China, the US being third and Indonesia fourth, with a caveat: “Emerging economies need to enhance their institutions and their infrastructure significantly if they are to realise their long-term growth potential.”

Can our policies better contribute to realising this market potential? Consider the options. One approach is open exploitation, unmindful of whether the ownership and distribution of profits is domestic or foreign. Prices are determined solely by supply and demand, without government regulation or any other authority. Another extreme is that the government decides everything, which has been seen to fail. A third option is a mix, with open-market principles in areas that can sustain them, such as in consumer goods, tempered with appropriate regulation, e.g., against harmful substances. Ideally, policies should be for the long-term common good with sustainable levels of equitable access. Regulation is essential where network economics apply with few players, as in electricity and communications. Our mix is not ideal because realpolitik and populism overwhelm the need for deep understanding followed by the objective and convergent deliberation needed to frame beneficial policies (through sound institutions, also lacking).

Our policies are often indifferent to where ownership lies, and sometimes, this is a problem. For example, heavy industries or electronics majors abroad often have government backing. Indian enterprises start with a disadvantage, because of restricted access to capital, and at higher cost. Another aspect is when the ownership of major local corporates with privileged access to markets changes to being majority foreign-owned, because the profits are sent abroad. Yet another is that we do not have ecosystems for manufacturing start-ups through commercialisation and scaling up, in terms of financing, production and procurement. Attention seems confined to early-stage start-ups or to small-and-medium enterprises, with no ecosystem to see them through to establishing scale, comparable, for instance, to the building up of Huawei through consistent procurement.

Our greatest deficiency, however, remains lack of good infrastructure. Correcting this requires a long view, capital, slow payback and long lead times for results, usually beyond election cycles. Easily sidelined for populist measures for immediate gains, this area needs concerted, bipartisan, societal convergence. A case in point is telecom and broadband, where spectrum auctions loom again, even as operators struggle with low revenues and high debt from previous auctions. Another is the recent Supreme Court ruling against compensatory tariffs for two ultra-mega power projects at Mundra, of 4,000 Megawatt (Mw) (Tata) and 4,620 Mw (Adani), based on whether a “change in law” applies only to Indian laws. If the tariffs were upheld, five buyer states would get a lower than average price paid, substantially below the current market price. If these projects become unviable, they will add to the deadweight of NPAs. The banks they owe will also suffer, and there will be the opportunity cost of benefits foregone from the lower-priced electricity.

There may be a case for prioritising infrastructure, beginning with defining our objectives and then framing policies to achieve them. For power projects, it’s reasonably priced electricity; for telecom, it’s reasonably priced services. Until these are made possible through appropriate policies, there’s little likelihood of realising our full potential.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-may-3-2017-shyam-ponappa-policies-to-sustain-indias-market

Policies & the Public Interest

Shyam Ponappa — 2018-11-01T08:11:15Z

The public interest calls for real reforms for equitable growth.

The article was published in Business Standard on October 4, 2018 and in Organizing India Blogspot the same day.

Everyone understands that users need high-speed broadband links for a countrywide transformation, through access to education, healthcare, and much else including opportunity. The lofty aspirations of the New Digital Communications Policy 2018 (NDCP) are 50 Mbps “to every citizen”, 5G, and so on, whereas the reality is a plan for two Wi-Fi hotspots per village. Surely, mere aspirational statements after inordinate delays cannot help attain high-speed “broadband for all”. Nor can a gutted market bereft of policies to induce the required capital for connectivity and network efficiencies.

The NDCP epitomises overstatement juxtaposed with the realities of poor services. Key reforms have been consigned to a future imperfect limbo: reducing additional taxes (from an exorbitant 32 per cent), achieving more efficient spectrum use, and the like. Our needs are staggering, but what we have so far are statements of intent without real policy changes in the public interest. A similar approach has played out in the manufacture of electronics and solar power. India’s mobile revolution depended entirely on imports of network equipment, software, and handsets.1 Likewise for solar power, India has relied on imports. Recent efforts to elicit interest in manufacturing solar equipment locally received lacklustre response, because of perceived inadequacies in policies and incentives. The crux of the matter is how public interest, which many of our politicians, administrators and analysts claim as their motivation, is construed. An additional wrinkle is of being “pro-poor”.

What does the “public interest” mean, and how does “pro-poor” fit in other than by perpetuating poverty? Some proponents regard the “aam aadmi” as being synonymous with the public interest, and others “the masses”, or “the poor”, or farmers. There is also segmentation by exclusion, such as “not those who own vehicles”. Exclusions also apply to manufacturing, such as cars or two-wheelers, because they add to pollution and congestion on roads. So also to air conditioners, refrigerators, and so on, perhaps from the confusion of conflating market principles with socialist ideas of “luxury goods” having a pejorative taint, whereas our need is for engines of growth, except in sin goods and services. In fact, the automotive sector provides a model for coordinated policies (except for fuel pricing).2

Our fuel pricing is puzzling, because while it affects the majority, it is treated as affecting only the affluent (many of whom are also likely to be very productive). Affluent consumers comprised around 27 per cent of India’s population in 2016, and may grow to 40 per cent by 2025.3 Constraining productivity and output is surely not beneficial except in containing imports, especially when productivity is declining (see Chart). Yet, this is the effect of high taxes on inputs. This is why there’s a genuine need for the evaluation of alternatives to demand compression and high taxes.

Labour Productivity in India - January 2010 to November 2017
Source: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/india/labour-productivity-growth What, indeed, is the definition of public interest? Here is a version: It is the welfare or well-being of the general public, by which the whole society has a stake that warrants recognition, promotion and protection of the government and its agencies. The overall public interest is about society as a whole, unalloyed by divisive or fractious special interests. It is not the welfare of any individual, group or company. In seeking to maximise overall welfare, however, there need to be trade-offs and selective regulations for justifiable subsets, such as the underprivileged, or in spatial planning for town and country, or sectoral regulations for energy, exports, or automotive products.

Yet, while the criterion should be public welfare, the arguments we encounter are mostly for special interest groups. Rarely is there a consideration for the welfare of society as a whole. How might a holistic approach to public interest alter the stance to policy making, administration, analysis and advocacy? Consider this example from Brazil after the global financial crisis of 2008. Brazil suffered decreasing exports, lower investment, and a credit crunch with deleveraging, resulting in lower incomes and tax collections, and higher unemployment. The government’s response in 2008-09 was a selective reduction in taxes, together with increased liquidity, and reduced interest rates to the most affected sectors.4 These policy changes reduced a tax component, initially in the automotive sector for a quarter, later continued for about a year. This was extended to consumer durables/electrical appliances, and to building materials, the latter for about 15 months. For some products such as stoves and small washing machines, this tax was reduced to zero. Meanwhile, taxes on cigarettes were increased. The result was an increase in tax revenues from higher production and consumption, after an initial fall in tax collections. Simulation is a useful way of evaluating alternative scenarios. Converted to cash flows, these inputs can be used to shape policies, because cash flows are an essential measure of reality.

A compelling reason for scenario planning is that coordinated policies could yield higher growth than foreign borrowings without systematic policy support. A policy framework with lower interest rates and good infrastructure (energy, logistics and communications) could accelerate growth, thereby attracting capital despite current account imbalances. Such alternatives deserve to be evaluated against the approach of higher interest rates to attract, then struggle to retain foreign capital (when there is a flight to quality, raising interest rates in emerging markets is usually ineffective), with lower growth. Lower rates would also facilitate redeeming NPAs, as banks could profit from rising bond prices.

It is in the public interest to analyse alternative approaches, including input costs and taxes. Areas such as the allocation and management of coal, automotive fuel pricing and automotive manufacturing, and spectrum allocation and management need such analyses. In finance, the alternatives are of inflation targeting, taxes to reduce the fiscal deficit, high interest rates to attract/retain foreign capital, and managing imports, against scenarios with lower taxes, interest rates, and coordinated policies as in the automotive sector for manufacturing and logistics in sectors such as electronics and solar power equipment.

Shyam Ponappa at gmail dot com
1: Sanjib Purohit, NCAER, March 14, 2018

2: http://www.siamindia.com/uploads/filemanager/47AUTOMOTIVEMISSIONPLAN.pdf

3: https://www.bcg.com/en-in/publications/2017/marketing-sales-globalization-new-indian-changing-consumer.aspx

4: [Input-Output Matrix study of tax reductions-Brazil-2014]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-october-4-2018-shyam-ponappa-policies-and-the-public-interest

Plugging into India’s broadband revolution

Navadha Pandey — 2019-06-05T14:02:48Z

After many false starts, the plan to wire India’s digital future may finally take off with Jio GigaFiber’s entry.

The article by Navadha Pandey was published in Livemint on June 4, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

All through 2018, 58-year-old Ashok Kumar Rai’s Lucknow-based small architecture firm used to spend a princely sum of ₹11,800 each month for the privilege of a good broadband internet connection. “We used to send building walk-through files to clients every day and the size of each file could go up to 1GB (gigabytes)," he says. Doling out cash for reliable internet was a necessity. All that changed when a new player, Atria Convergence Technologies Ltd (ACT), came to Rai’s upmarket Gomti Nagar neighbourhood in Lucknow. In the summer of 2019, Rai’s internet access speed has shot up from 4 to 150 Mbps (megabits per second). And the monthly bill has come crashing down to about ₹1,000.

For far too long, India’s internet action lay centered in its metros, leaving out even relatively big cities like Lucknow. The fledgling online access push into smaller cities and rural India happened primarily via mobile data transmitted over wireless spectrum. Home broadband was nowhere in the picture. But all that seems set for some dramatic change. If the country’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has his way, high-speed broadband will become a reality in at least 1,600 cities.

In the process, he aims to also leapfrog India from its current rank—134—in fixed-line broadband penetration to the top five with the help of Jio GigaFiber.

The dream of a broadband revolution, however, has its fair share of detractors. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, for example, who helms the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CWEiT at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), says: “Fiber penetration will take a long time in India."

The logic is simple: unlike mobile towers, fiber needs to reach each home physically. China’s broadband boom happened because it has rebuilt nearly its entire housing stock in the last 15 years, fuelled by a construction-led growth bubble. “In India, initially only all the upcoming new buildings may get connected to fiber-based (fast) internet," says Ramamurthi.

But India’s untapped millions are about to set off a race. And this journey, which will clearly not be a cakewalk, has huge rewards in store. Sample this: India has 1.16 billion mobile subscribers but just 18.42 million wired broadband subscribers. And many of them, like Rai, are data hungry. There is an existing playbook: what happened to mobile broadband after 2014.

In 2014, the cost of one GB of mobile data was ₹270. Now, it is ₹10 per GB. As a result, mobile data consumption has soared. In late-2014, an average user on Airtel’s network (India’s largest telecom operator back then) used 622 megabytes (MB) of data in a month. By late-2018, the number of users had tripled, but, despite a broader base, average data usage stood at 10GB a month.

First-mover advantage

The expansion in wired broadband access may have far-reaching implications beyond a mere spike in data usage. When Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industry Ltd which owns Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, declared optical fibre based fixed-line broadband as “the future" last July, the real play was not on the infrastructure itself, but the services that would ride on top—from smart home experiences to new forms of e-commerce. The revenue and the first-mover advantage lie in who gets to tap into the “ecosystem"—of how a household connects to the wider world to buy, watch, and exchange.

Essentially, new businesses could emerge to feed the “ecosystem". And some existing small and medium-scale businesses may finally become viable enough to expand and go big. Netflix, for example, emerged as one of the world’s largest video streaming platform, riding on top of the US broadband boom. But India already has a crowded pack of 34 web video streaming entertainment platforms, most of which have cropped up to sustain the attention of mobile data guzzling Indians. With wired broadband following mobile usage expansion, unlike in most other countries, India’s new-age internet businesses are likely to be unique and different.

Home-based surveillance and security systems could be one space that could gain significant traction, says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based think-tank Centre for Internet and Society. “If there are 40 families (in a high-rise apartment) who have babies and need surveillance facilities, each apartment going for an individual connection from a telecom service provider would involve a huge amount of money. But a fibre-based intranet or peer network could connect all 40 flats for a much smaller price," he says.

There could also be unintended consequences for the country’s digital gender divide. Only 29% of India’s current internet users are women, according to a recent Unicef report. If the cost of wired broadband begins to crash—thereby increasing the number of homes which have access—women who will never get access to a phone (due to the cost of device and patriarchy) will finally be able to see things on the internet, says Nandini Chami, a researcher at IT for Change, a non-governmental organization. “How this negotiation will happen inside the house, we will have to wait and watch," she says. Household-level access would also confuse corporate entities trying to “hyper-profile" users since multiple people will be accessing the internet through shared devices at home, she adds.

But as internet access improves, making the digital economy more vital, Chami says, governments would have an important role in ensuring women get to use the internet “on terms that are empowering". “We can think of innovative models when fixed broadband becomes cheap. The household is not the space for this. It can be libraries which have special times for young girls or digital labs for women. We need to rethink the missed opportunity of the BharatNet and the national optic fibre network. Internet access should not stop at just the panchayat office. We must think of different points of access, particularly for women," Chami adds.

The possibility of many of these radical changes in both the social and business realms will, of course, entirely rely on the pace at which India goes broadband. Despite the rapid expansion in mobile internet, data originating from mobile devices still account for only 20% of India’s data consumption. That is why what happens in the wired broadband space will matter increasingly. And that is also why Jio is betting big on expanding the existing wired user base (18 million) to 50 million.

The Jio gameplan

Jio is currently running beta trials for GigaFiber in New Delhi and Mumbai, providing 100GB of data at 100 Mbps for free, except for the ₹4,500 one-time deposit for a router. While the landline will come with unlimited calling facility, television channels will be delivered over the internet (Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV). The packaged trio of fast Internet, landline telephony, and television access will remain free for a while—similar to what had happened in the mobile phone services segment in 2016. After commercial launch, the per month cost is expected to be ₹600, roughly half of what similar services cost currently.

Jio’s rival Bharti Airtel Ltd has decided that it is not interested in the entire pie but just the creamy top layer. It will focus on premium customers and expand its broadband services across India’s top 100 cities, instead of copying Reliance Jio’s ambitious plan to create a fibre-optic network across the country. To achieve this, Airtel, which already has 2.36 million fibre customers, will stay focussed on high-rise buildings rather than horizontal deployment, as this business model is more economical and logical.

The dark horse in this race is, of course, ACT with its existing 1.42 million customers. Its presence is much smaller with just 18 cities, largely in the south India and the newly expanded zones of Delhi, Jaipur and Lucknow. On the ACT fibre network, average data consumption per user is already at 130GB a month.

“We have seen a 150% increase in average consumption in the last 18 months," says Bala Malladi, chief executive officer, ACT. “People are now looking at higher speeds and the experience is taking precedence over cost. In fact, even in the hinterland, people want higher speeds and non-buffered experience," he adds.

But why hasn’t fibre penetration gone up if the demand is booming? Why did India miss the bus when other countries like the US have an 80% fibre penetration?

Policy paralysis

Firstly, fibre is expensive to lay, unlike a SIM card which can be given away for free. Moreover, India till a few years ago was mostly a voice calls market and not a data market. Secondly, municipalities in India have complicated right-of-way (RoW) procedures which act as a big hurdle for digging and laying fibre. This is one of the reasons why even government (such as the Delhi government) plans to set up citywide surveillance and Wi-Fi hotspots have failed.

“The centre has finally issued a very good RoW model, but now every state has to come up with its own policy modelled on the central guidelines. They are taking their own sweet time," says Rajan Mathews, director general, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

The lack of forward movement on these fixable policy issues assumes significance given the government’s focus on fibre in its National Digital Communications Policy-2018, which has a target of attracting $100 billion worth of investments in digital communications.

The policy’s goals include universal broadband for all, creating four million jobs in digital communications, and raising the share of digital communications in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) to 8% (from less than 6% in 2017). Deployment of five million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2020 through a National Broadband Mission is also on the agenda. The key goal, however, is to provide 1 Gbps (gigabit per second) connectivity to all gram panchayats by 2020 and 10 Gbps by 2022.

The sad reality is that the last five years were an absolute failure in laying fibre in the country. BharatNet, the flagship mission to connect 250,000 gram panchayats with broadband, which was being implemented by Bharat Broadband Network Ltd (BBNL), a special purpose vehicle set up under the department of telecommunications (DoT) in February 2012, has been a disappointment, to say the least.

The government has completed laying optical fibre cables across more than 100,000 gram panchayats in the first phase and had aimed to complete connecting the remaining 150,000 councils by March 2019. The second phase has seen “zero progress", according to government officials close to the matter. Pained by poor utilization of digital infrastructure, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) suggested auctioning BharatNet infrastructure on an “as is where is" basis after a meeting held in December at the prime minister’s office to take stock of the mission.

To start with, the DoT plans to monetize fibre assets built by the government under its flagship mission BharatNet through outright sale to private players or by leasing these assets for a 20-year period after a bidding process. If successful, it could boost connectivity in Indian villages, which have so far been kept out of the digital dividend.

Bigger cities, however, will have a different consumption story. With intra-city fibre coverage leading to improved penetration, wired broadband would not just offer an enhanced content viewing experience, but also open doors for internet of things, or IoT. “Home security is going to become a big business going forward, riding on fibre. Even gaming will see a lot of traction as you can enjoy a 4K game in real-time, thanks to low latency and high speed of an optic network," Malladi of ACT says.

The looming question, however, is how much investment can operators put in given the current low tariff environment in the telecom sector. Big players are stressed for funds and are diluting their non-core assets to generate funds to keep networks afloat. “If you are looking at what will happen in the next three years... I believe that there is a business case to be made and tariffs should sustain it (the investment)," Mathews says.

Whether that happens or not could become an important footnote in India’s growth story. The far-reaching implications of fast internet access pushed billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX), to launch 60 internet-beaming satellites last month. The grand scheme is a response to the practical constraint of laying fibre, a concern which is more pressing in India’s vast landmass.

Unlike Musk, the country’s broadband dreams, however, still remain rooted to the ground—in the simple tech of optic fibre. And the success or failure of those dreams will be written by how fast the fibre network expands.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/news/livemint-navadha-pandey-june-4-2019-plugging-into-indias-broadband-revolution

Plan and Execute for Results

Shyam Ponappa — 2012-05-10T10:51:12Z

Good SOPs are a starting point, but there's more under the surface that will affect results.

What is a good way to plan and build enduring systems, e.g., for sanitation and water in our cities and countryside, roads (rail/waterways/air for logistics), or a broadband network for communications? Some thoughts on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) — beginnings, processes and ends — and on some “invisible” aspects that facilitate good outcomes.

The Big Picture

Start with the big picture: the engineering background of China’s leaders has no doubt contributed to their conceptualisation and achievement so far. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao were engineers, as were former President Ziang Zemin, and Premiers Zhu Rongji and Li Peng. While pondering if that’s what it will take to improve India’s record on conceptualisation and execution, we find that former President Deng Xiaoping, who got China going on its current track, didn’t have it. No engineering degree, although he went to France when he was 16 for a work-study programme. Despite a difficult experience with entry level jobs in shoe manufacturing, metals, automobiles, and restaurants, he was very effective in applying himself to building China. So, there’s hope if our leaders apply themselves to long-term solutions, rather than to self-aggrandisement. This might be of their own volition, or because the public and/or circumstances force them to do so. For instance, if RTI activists concentrate on one major objective at a time, while paying attention to facts, thinking, talking and acting logically in close cooperation and coordination, i.e., with sound direction, we might get results.

Fundamental SOPs

Some fundamentals are clear enough, although we rarely seem to follow them, like an integrated systems perspective with disciplined project management (listed below). There are, however, many assumptions and enveloping circumstances that affect the drivers directly, as well as their boundary conditions and interactions. These can be easily lost sight of in pursuing a line of thought or action, or even particular disciplines. This is valid for all issues, for instance, increasing the hit rate for road projects put to bid by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), or the successful completion of power projects, or efforts to structure and manage spectrum for broadband. Therefore, for user-centric area planning/spatial planning, the overriding emphasis is necessarily on an interdisciplinary (i.e., multidisciplinary) approach. This is because societies and their needs are multi-dimensional, and solutions must work in a complex set of circumstances. Silo thinking and action won’t work.

This is true whether for neighbourhoods or for country-wide networks such as road systems, railways, or broadband. It is also true for the content, i.e., for broad areas like education from kindergarten to postgraduate levels including vocational training and Continuing-Education for all people, or for a single vertical space, such as health care or hospitality.

The fundamental elements (SOPs) include:

End-to-end systems, i.e., comprehensive, integrated pieces that fit.
Convergent objectives.
Systematic, disciplined project management, starting with the desired end results, and a backward induction for intermediate goals at each step with the required resources and time, all the way back to the start.
An interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary approach, because sound inputs are required from multiple perspectives, such as overall strategy, structure, systems, technology, human resources, finance, and markets, tailored to our culture and practices, even as we improve them.
Coordination & Direction: above all, there needs to be convergence of efforts to achieve a desired goal or direction. Without coordination and direction, efforts are unlikely to converge, and therefore unlikely to achieve desired outcomes.

Other Essential Aspects

Self-Governing Systems vs Government Intervention
Much has been made recently of Prof Elinor Ostrom’s ideas on polycentric governance and self-regulation. However, there is insufficient appreciation of and attention to her stress on (a) trust as the most critical attribute, and (b) checks and balances (incentives/penalties) that are “accepted”, as she understates it. Cooperative action is certainly a winner, provided there is an effort by players to build trust, and sound rules are devised and applied impartially. Can you imagine a country-wide highway system or broadband network in the public interest, designed and developed by independent commercial interests? Possible, but unlikely. That’s why governments need to act in the public interest.
Allowing for the Non-Rational & Emotional
Years ago, Carl Sagan popularised the ideas of Paul MacLean, who headed the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior in America’s National Institute of Mental Health. The concept was of a three-part structure of the brain: the deep down R-complex (for reptilian-complex) where aggression resides, the limbic system which is the seat of emotions, and the neocortex, which is rational and cognitive. While neurology has moved on in the details, e.g., the hippocampus is now apparently thought to be less important in emotions than in MacLean’s view, and the brain may be less simply compartmentalised, the idea of rational man is no longer assumed as a truism.
The Normal Curve & Dysfunctional Elements
For those not familiar with statistics, there is a universal phenomenon of distribution along the “normal” curve: any group of objects (or people) measured for any attribute — height, weight, goodness — is likely to be distributed along a probability curve, as in the graph above, with some outliers spread over the lower and higher ends or “tails”, and the rest bunched around the middle/mean/average.

The takeaway: plan for the dysfunctional elements in the left tail, and build protection mechanisms in systems. Consideration with item 2 above indicates the kind of protection robust systems might need.

Good SOPs are a starting point, but there’s more under the surface that will affect results, regardless of external factors.

Link to the original article on Business Standard

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/plan-execute-results

Payal Malik

praskrishna — 2012-10-12T05:50:30Z

Payal Malik is currently, Advisor to the Competition Commission of India. She has years of research experience in issues of competition and regulation in network industries like power, telecommunication and water. Her research collaborations have involved TRAI, Competition Commission of India, OECD, World Bank, and many others.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/payal-malik

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

praskrishna — 2012-06-27T06:52:50Z

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an independent journalist and an educator. His work experience, spanning nearly 35 years, cuts across different media: print, radio, television and documentary cinema. He is a writer, speaker, anchor, interviewer, teacher and a commentator. His main areas of interest are the working of India’s political economy and the media, on which he has authored/co-authored books and directed/produced documentary films. Some of the media organizations that he has worked with are Business India, BusinessWorld, The Telegraph, India Today, The Pioneer, and Television Eighteen.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/paranjoy-guha-thakurta