'$38 b required to achieve teledensity of 7 per 100 by 2005'

BANGALORE: The government's target of achieving a tele-density of seven per 100 by 2005 would involve an investment of $38 billion, thereby opening up new investment avenues for the NRI community, Minister for Communications Ram Vilas Paswan has said. Speaking at a meeting in New York, Mr Paswan said the country would need an investment of $70 billion by 2010 to reach the targeted tele-density of 15 per 100.

He stated that a new set of investment opportunities were being put in place to attract new investors and under the New Telecom Policy-99 (NTP-99), a number of new avenues were available for fresh investors, including the cellular mobile telephony and basic telephony. Mr Paswan said that the details were being worked out and would be announced soon.

The government was taking steps to provide the infrastructure necessary for the rapid growth of the private sector. This included separation of services from the policy and licensing in DoT by creating a separate department of telecom services (DTS), which would be corporatised in 2001. Mr Paswan said the national long distance service would be opened up early in 2000 and added that there would be immense opportunities in setting up long distance bandwidth capacity in the country. There would be numerous opportunities for other service providers in applications such as tele-banking, tele-medicine, tele-education and e-commerce, he said. In order to ensure seamless flow of information, adequate bandwidth on national routes and even in certain congested important national routes would be provided, the Minister said.