Telecommunications policy in India: The political underpinnings of reform

In the mid-1980s India became one of the first developing countries to launch reforms in its telecommunications services; yet 10 years later little change had been introduced in the sector. Then in 1994 the government launched a new national telecommunications policy which has a considerable number of important features that are rather puzzling and uniquely Indian. This paper argues that the slow pace and uniqueness of India's telecommunications reform are to be explained in terms of the country's institutional arrangements. Radical telecommunications reforms move at a slow pace, take peculiar local twists or fall in implementation when (1) the state is highly permeable and vulnerable to demands from powerful, domestic interest groups that oppose changes in the sector; and/or (2) top government officials diverge and clash over the reform agenda, generally due to the head of state's lack of power.