What-a-phone!

In the late 1980s, when I graduated from university and started working in New Delhi, there used to be a long-haired, French-bearded gentleman who advised Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi on telecommunications. Sam Pitroda dreamt of a telephone connection in every village.

Though I do not know if every village has a telephone connection, in the last two decades we certainly have witnessed a telecom revolution. At first there were the ubiquitous ISD-STD-PCO booths which spawned an age of small-scale enterprise in telecommunications.

This was followed by the cell phone revolution, which started another round of family-level private enterprise for talk-time recharging.