Surbhi Chawla on the sector’s ugly past and present
Wireless telephony reached Indian shores in 1995 – the year Spectrum was allocated to private players for the first time. From those early days itself this sector has been plagued by controversies. Every minister who took charge of the telecom ministry found himself in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The unfortunate trend was started by Sukh Ram – the first telecom minister to take charge after the sector was liberalised. In 1996 when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided his house, the sleuths had found crores of rupees stashed away in – of all places – his prayer room. The investigations that followed the seizure revealed that the minister had made this illgotten fortune from private players keen to hop onto the telecom bandwagon. The immense potential of the segment had the minister taking huge advantage.
It was in 2002 – during the NDA regime – that Reliance Infocom (now renamed Reliance Communications) and Tata Teleservices began introducing the CDMA technology in the country to replace GSM, which was all we had at the time. Back then the late Pramod Mahajan, who was telecom minister in that government, was alleged to have favoured big corporates by giving them Spectrum at a relatively low cost. Mahajan subsequently drew heavy flak in Parliament, where some among the Opposition had gone to the extent of branding him as the Reliance man in the NDA government.
Dayanidhi Maran was the next to be asked to vacate, though his own case was rather different from the others. For though Maran was M Karunanidhi’s poster boy, his brother Kalandhi, who headed the SUN TV network, was unacceptable to many.
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