A Raja, the minister for communications and IT, has expressed concern about the low levels of rural tele-density in spite of remarkable growth of the telecom sector and low tariffs.

The minister inaugurated the 14th India Telecommunications International Summit 2008 in New Delhi. He noted that vast stretches of India’s rural population have little or no telecom access and that a large rural-urban divide in connectivity existed. According to the minister, the government proposed to reach rural teledensity of 25% by providing 200 million rural connections by the end of the 11th Plan. Until now, nearly 88 million phones have been provided in the rural areas with a tele-density of around 11%.

The Minister said that efforts were being made under the universal service obligation (USO) fund to improve infrastructure to make wireless phone services available in rural and remote areas of the country. He stressed that improved telecom connectivity would help the rural areas to be included in the rapid growth processes.

Raja said that a total of 600 million connections have been envisaged by the end of 2012, which would require equipment worth $73 billion in the next 5 years. The majority of the investment is expected to be realised through foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in mobile communication. Presently, all key global telecom players like Vodafone, Nokia, Elcoteq, Alcatel, LG, and Ericsson have their manufacturing bases in India.

Raja said that broadband subscriber base grew from 0.18 million in March 2005 to more than four million in August 2008 due to government initiatives to promote broadband in the country. It is also hoped that that Internet and broad-band subscribers would increase to 40 million and 20 million, respectively, by 2010.

The Telecom summit is being attended by major players in the Indian and global telecom industry, telecom operators and service providers. X