How telecom can enrich billion lives in next few years?
v Bridging
the digital connectivity gap
·
Overall telecom penetration gap – VLR (Active
mobile customers)- 707.3m; If we exclude multiple connections[1]
and ~325m population below age of 15[2],
somewhere about 375m Indians do not have an active telecom connection yet.
·
Rural telecom penetration gap – Almost 500m
rural population does not own a phone
·
The rural mobile subscriber base is
anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% between 2012 and
2016, at nearly twice the expected growth rate of the saturated
urban market. It is likely that 62% of the
new mobile subscribers added in the next five years will be
from the rural market.[3] The
National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2012 also envisages to increase rural teledensity
from the current level of around 39 to 70 by the year 2017 and 100 by the year
2020.[4]
·
Internet access gap is likely to be bridged
in next few years by mobile broadband. 3G subscribers are expected to reach 142
million by 2015, accounting for 12% of the total wireless subscriber base.
Further, 3G subscribers are expected to be more than 300 million by 2020,
accounting for 20% of the total wireless subscriber base.[5]
v Financial
Inclusion through Mobile Platform
·
Primary attribute of inclusive growth is
financial inclusion which requires greater access to capital.
·
Out of approx 1200 million of Indian
population, nearly 70 percent lives in rural locations and over 90 million
rural households are on farming.
·
Approximately 27 percent are indebted to
formal sources and 13 percent are availing loans from the banks in the annual
income bracket of INR 50,000 or less.
·
Millions of people in rural India have little
or no access to credit, even from non-institutional sources. Approximately 50
million farmer households in India have not taken any bank
credit so far
·
Rural
banking does not appear to be a financially viable activity for banks
either.
·
Banks have ~7.4 lac point of sales, ~ 1 lac
ATMs, ~94000 branches of scheduled commercial banks[6]
, 18.3m credit cards and 302m debit cards[7].
Whereas Telecom Service Providers have ~150 Lac point of sales and cover 80% of
Indian geography.
·
Mobile platform by creating a branchless
banking system for the communities can be a potential tool for
financial inclusion.
·
Low
tariffs and low cost of handset provide a clear value proposition for driving
financial inclusion through mobile platforms.
v Efficient
delivery of public services
·
By virtue of their ubiquitous nature, mobiles enable anytime, anywhere
access to and delivery of services, bridging the last mile gap without huge
upfront investments, even from rural and remote areas of the country, where
computer and internet penetration is still low.
·
Department of IT finalised the Mobile
Governance Policy Framework in January 2012
·
The Framework addresses many
essential issues that can help efficient delivery of public service through
mobile
o making government websites mobile-compliant,
o developing
mobile applications in open standards to become interoperable across
various operating systems and devices,
o use
of uniform/single pre-designed numbers in the form long/short codes for mobile
services,
o creation
of Mobile Service Delivery Gateway (MSDG) as the core integrating
infrastructure for multi-channel delivery
·
Department of Information Technology
(DIT), Government of India, has created National e Governance Division (NeGD)
as an autonomous business division within Media Lab Asia, under the Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology, Government of India, for taking up
the tasks being carried out by the Programme Management Unit National
e-Governance Plan (PMU-NeGP) at DIT. NeGD through Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC), has been developing the modularly-scalable Mobile
Service Delivery Platform and Gateway (MSDP/ MSDG)
·
Strengthening this framework and bringing
more and more government schemes and services under it in next few years can
help to bring in inclusive growth
v Effective
transfer of benefits under govt. schemes
·
The service, based on mobile
phones and biometric authentication, can form the core micro-payment
platform for the transfer of benefits under various government schemes
v Creating
more jobs
·
Research conducted by ITU and several other
entities have shown direct correlation of increased telecom penetration and
broadband access to economic development
·
While the telecom industry in the rest of the
world obtains 35-50% revenues from non-voice services, India derives only ~15%
of sales from non-voice/ data services. Projections by UBS for major telecom
players in India indicate that the non-voice revenues are going to be ~30% of
total revenues for these players by 2020 With digitization of cable TV
services, convergence encompassing TV, broadband and Telecom is possible. All
this will shift the focus towards multi lingual content creation and VAS innovation.
·
More jobs expected in telecom related
equipment and handset manufacturing, network expansions etc
What should be the
policy focus?
·
Further
improve percolation of internet/broadband
·
Improve
impediments(like Right of Way and tower site clearances) for creating physical
infrastructure
·
Further
enhancement of network capabilities (esp. Optical fiber network) in rural areas
·
Improve
resilience/robustness of mobile
infrastructure esp. for remote
areas
·
Bring down
cost of entry level handsets to below Rs 500 & smart phones and tablets to
below Rs 2500; Make available multi-lingual handsets
·
Foster
innovation in local/rural content and VAS with a focus on regional languages
·
Promote
R&D and indigenous manufacturing of telecom and related equipments
·
Complete
integration of mobile delivery infrastructure with the core
e-Government backbone infrastructure.
[1] GSMA
report says on average every mobile users in India has 2.2 SIM, compared
to worldwide average SIM per person of 1.85;
If we take world average of 1.85 it means of 921m subscriptions in
India, the unique subscribers are about 497.8m
[2] http://www.nationmaster.com/country/in/Age_distribution
[5]
Enabling the Next Wave of Growth in India : Ernst &Young and FICCI
[6] excludes
rural post offices -1.15 lac , co-operative banks, agricultural credit societies, self help groups
etc
[7] http://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/ATMView.aspx
