Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

76 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
‘unremunerative’. The aftermath of the initial liberalization scheme included
a national strike, two ‘Telecommunications Scandals’, dozens of
public-interest petitions, a stalemate in both houses of parliament, and
(however indirectly) the electoral defeat in 1996 of the Congress Party
that had introduced the reforms.
In 1999, the right-wing BJP coalition government introduced a new
NTP (1999) in order to meet the WTO commitments by corporatizing
the largest state-owned operators (2001), reinforcing its commitment to
an independent regulatory agency (the Telecommunications Regulatory
Authority of India (TRAI)), liberalizing long-distance services (2003) and
introducing new mechanisms to force private operators to provide minimum
rural connectivity. As in Brazil, telecommunications density expanded
exponentially between the mid-1980s and the late 1990s. Building
on several decades of state-funded research in electronics and software,
the government began to link telecommunications expansion to
high-tech growth aimed at the export of software services in cities like
Bangalore, Hyderabad and New Delhi. Unsurprisingly, the most rapid
transformations have happened in urban areas with large corporate users
and a growing number of middle-class consumers linked by high-speed
networks and new communications services to counterparts in the North
and South. The highly skewed expansion favouring urban markets is
clearly unsustainable in a nation where over 740 million people (some
12 per cent of the world’s population) live in rural areas. In 2002, the
government ‘removed rural obligations’ for private operators, once again
raising the ire of a range of opponents protesting against the state’s skewed
development agenda (Jhunjhunwala et al. 2004). The electoral defeat of
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in 2004 has been closely
associated with its failure to promote the benefits of ‘high-tech India’ beyond
the interests of the globalized urban middle classes. Once again,
public pressure from civil-society organizations including hundreds of
prominent non-governmental organizations (NGOs), a variety of social
movements, including labour unions, have kept questions of redistribution
on the negotiating table. 11
In both the Brazilian and Indian cases, we see that the negotiation
of telecommunications liberalization has taken place in the context of
public debates about the promises and costs of rapid global integration.
In both cases, a longer legacy of state investment in domestic research and
development (R&D) in the telecommunications and electronics sectors
(Evans 1995) has meant that the issue of appropriate technology and the
cost effectiveness of reliance of patented imports are recurring concerns
in public debates about the costs of global integration. In the case of the
Chinese authoritarian state, it has not been explicit political opposition or