No roller coaster ride can match the dizzying pace, the highs, the lows, and the twists and turns of the telecom services sector in India. The advent of mobile telephony and the private sector into telecom in the country set off a chain of events that made history and re-scripted the future of India. The start of the journey, like any roller coaster ride, was beguilingly slow. Against the backdrop of economic liberalization initiated by the then Narasimha Rao Government, NTP 1994 introduced mobile telephony and opened the gates to the private sector with two operators in each circle. However, NTP 1994 belied expectations and did not exactly set the Ganges on fire. Services were expensive and handsets were unaffordable, except for the rich. Consequently, uptake was low and penetration was minimal and largely confined to urban areas. Worse, the operators who succeeded in obtaining licenses through a fiercely competitive bid process discovered that they had grossly misread the market, bid way too high, and were afflicted by the winners' curse. They mounted pressure on the government to revise the contracts. These pleas were backed by International Financial Institutions like the WB and IFC. Soon, the Government too realized that the policy had become a constraint rather than an enabler and began looking for new solutions.
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