Land lines still signify privilege

Though I was much too small ever to use it, our first telephone number -- Park (always said as PK) 504 -- is graven in my mind. Then, when we returned to Calcutta after several years up country as we used to call the mofussil that was north India, came Park 1066.

The number earned my father the sobriquet of William the Conqueror from his friends, and is the easily traceable ancestor of the number that my mother continued and I am still happy to use.

You will gather from these comments that I am one of those dehatis who regard the telephone as a modern miracle. Not for me the sophistication of corporate chiefs who summon their drivers on their mobiles after dining in expensive restaurants.

Nor the nonchalance of a nephew who said the other day when we were talking of the Internet that e-mail is passé. "Everyone uses SMS!" he pronounced airily. I knew as a child that a telephone was a status symbol. Having one set us apart from many neighbours, acquaintances and relatives.

We must have been something like 1 per cent, or even fewer, in those days, highlighting the great divide not between town and country, but between the two Indias. I say that because while there were -- and are -- plenty of rich people in the countryside, the vast impoverished armies of basti  and chawl inhabitants in every Indian city probably remain the country's most deprived.

Much is made of Dharavi's television aerials and of Kerala fishermen warning each other on cell phones of bad weather conditions. But land lines still signify privilege.

If they bear out India's supposed 300 million middle-class consumers, they also underline the bleak fact of another 300 million languishing below the poverty line on less than a dollar a day, to use the appropriate international yardstick.

Veteran diplomat K P S Menon believed that the telephone had revolutionised international relations. In his Dr Saiyidain Memorial lecture on Changing Patterns of Diplomacy, he quoted Leo Tolstoy as saying "Beware of a Genghis Khan with a telephone."

His own comment was that even without a telephone, Genghis Khan managed to lay half of Europe and Asia waste. "Through the telephone, or simply by pressing a button, a modern Genghis Khan can in a trice let loose a nuclear war and destroy civilisation."

But though I can understand the pride with which Dayanidhi Maran proclaimed the other day that India has 100 million telephones, apparently including mobiles, I would be less boastful about it. For one thing, boasts often backfire. For another, the achievement has to be seen in perspective.

I recall a global conference in Singapore when, astonishingly for such an efficient city-state, all telephone lines suddenly collapsed. President Fidel Ramos of the Philippines loved it.

He enjoyed telling the assembled world leaders that Lee Kuan Yew had said in Manila that 98 per cent of Filipinos were waiting for a connection while the 2 per cent who were lucky enough to have telephones were waiting for a dial tone.

The Union communications and information technology minister's announcement conveys two messages. First, more than 900 million Indians are left out in the cold. Second, only about 6 per cent of the population has access to the telephone.

We are told that 86 per cent of the villages have at least one subsidised community telephone, but many of these are out of order like community television sets. It would be more accurate to say that under 2 per cent of rural Indians have telephones.

This, in turn, suggests two conclusions. The first is relative and the second absolute. Indian statistics might seem dazzling in Upper Volta, but the Asian countries with which we should compare ourselves -- Japan and South Korea -- claim a far higher proportion of people with phones.

There are 600 million subscribers even in China with a marginally higher population. Maran's promise that another 150 million people will be connected in the next three years may not narrow the gap, for the others will also move ahead.

More to the point -- and this should be our real concern -- the 900 million without will expand. That means a whole continent untouched by the telecommunications boom. This lopsidedness has always been the bane of Indian planning.

Reportedly, Sam Pitroda, the "Mr Technology" of the 1980s, stopped Rajiv Gandhi from squandering $ 100 million on importing 15,000 card-operated phones and 5,000 car phones.

"Let's first fix what we have" he is supposed to have advised. India then had 18,000 coin-operated telephones for 750 million people. Not all worked. There were three million private lines and a million pending applications.

Getting a connection was like capturing the moon. I failed during the few months of 1993 that I spent in Calcutta between returning from Honolulu and going on to Singapore. I was unemployed. I did not own property. I did not pay rent. I filled in endless forms. I lobbied legislators.

The information and broadcasting ministry's man in Kolkata endorsed my application. Journalistic friends in New Delhi tried to pull strings.

There was a moment of delicious irony when a P&T clerk recognised my name and suggested a letter from the editor of The Statesman -- where he had seen my articles -- would do the trick!

There has been a revolution since then. But it's still a revolution of the elite. Maran must spread it to the masses to avoid the danger of a real revolution.