Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

TELECOMMUNICATIONS POLICY 75
real limitations, we will discuss in later chapters how the Brazilian state has
taken an unprecedented lead among Southern nations in including civil
society participation in information policy design as well as in advocating
for greater ‘digital inclusion’ through the promotion of open-source
software. The point here is that redistributive claims for access continue
to play an important role in shaping the parameters of policy outcome.
Similar to the Brazilian experience in some ways, the Indian state has
also negotiated a slower pace of reform when compared to the rapid
liberalization undertaken by neighbours in the subcontinent as well as
throughout much of Southeast Asia. The democratic legacy of the Indian
state has meant that it has had to mediate political interests, ranging
from domestic capital to trade unions and new social movements that have
emerged since the 1980s (Chakravartty 2004). Although efforts to reform
the sector internally began in the mid-1980s, it was an unprecedented balance
of payments crisis in 1991 that forced the Congress government to
consider more drastic steps towards telecommunications liberalization.
This included the liberalization of the equipment market, and opening up
value-added services in the same way that cellular phones and paging were
to private investors in 1992. After several years of internal negotiations
between competing bureaucratic interests within the state, the government
passed the controversial 1994 National Telecommunications Policy
(NTP) in 1994, which opened basic services to limited foreign competition.
Policy-makers and business leaders alike bemoan interference from
‘vested interests’, characterizing the Indian case as ‘privatization without
deregulation’, with the state continuing to play a substantial role as
policy-maker, dominant operator and adjudicator.
Although initial corporate interest in the Indian telecommunications
market was euphoric, with unexpectedly high bids for cellular licences
and basic service licenses in lucrative regions, the entry of private and especially
foreign private investors was regulated on the basis of principles
of national and public interest. The implementation of reforms in India
was a drawn-out negotiated process between different institutional actors
within the state, competing interests between domestic and transnational
capital and growing public scrutiny of the liberalization process from
organized labour, consumer advocates and the media. While reformers
and corporate actors argued that public interest would be best served
by foreign investment and technology entering India’s vast untapped
market, critics held that the nation’s disparate information economy required
safeguards for the majority of low-income subscribers. The private
firms that entered the telecommunications market in India concentrated
their investment in urban areas, in many cases paying penalties to the
state rather than rolling out expensive infrastructure in areas deemed