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Over the last few decades the telecommunication sector in India has undergone a sea
change on account of the interplay of the Government and private
sector. It has played an important part in bridging the
rural-urban gap. Rapid economic growth, leading to a rise in the standard of living
of individuals has been the main driving factor for the fastest growth of the Indian
Telecom industry. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has been the first and
largest telephone operator. Worldwide it holds the
7th position with respect to the number
of subscribers. After the entry of private players in this sector in the
1990s, service providers like Bharati, Tata Indicom,
Vodafone, MTNL, BPL, Reliance, Idea and Aircel,
etc., have become the major operators in India apart from
BSNL.
The first non-commercial mobile telephone service started in Delhi in 1985 and on
a commercial basis from August 1995. The data in Table 1 gives us some idea
about the galloping growth in the telecommunication sector, especially
the mobile subscriber base.
As depicted in Table 1, among the total number of telephone subscribers in
India, 88.76% are cell phone subscribers and
merely 11.24% are landline users. In addition to that the data shows that monthly
cell phone addition is about 9.16 million, which is undoubtedly a robust
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