Politicians and bureaucrats like to highlight the growth of mobile telephony in India over the past decade as a sign of India’s economic development. India, it was stated had taken telephony to every nook and cranny of the country with over 900 million mobile subscribers.
While several people raised doubts about the 900 million mark, particularly given the spread of mobile phones with multiple-SIM slots, a recent report looking into the future of India’s mobile economy by the GSMA, a body that represents mobile operators across the world, estimated the actual number of mobile phone subscribers in India at just 350 million. So rather than the belief that 8 in 10 Indians had a mobile phone, only 1 in 3 actually had a mobile phone.
According to Anne Bouverot, Director-General of GSMA, this is because the number of ‘active’ mobile connections is far lower than the installed base and because, “many people in India also had multiple connections and devices.”
This also holds true globally, she added pointing out that while there were seven billion mobile phone connections across the world, “this does not mean that everybody in the world has a mobile phone, only 3.3 billion people have a mobile phone, but in India the gap is higher than the global average.”
According to the latest data available from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in the month of July, 2013, there were 874.88 million mobile connections in India of which 731.4 million connections were active.
This led to Nikhil Pahwa, Editor of telecom and digital media website, Medianama.com to question GSMA’s maths. “While there are a large number of people with multiple mobile connections, I strongly doubt that every actual subscriber has two active connections.”
According to him, the real number of mobile phone subscribers in India ought to be between 450-500 million, higher than the GSMA estimate but still much lower than the numbers touted by the Department of Telecom.
That said the GSMA was confident that with proper spectrum management, India’s telecom story could continue and indeed evolve into a mature market. The GSMA report predicts that by 2020 mobile telephony (including data) would contribute $400 billion to India’s Gross Domestic Product annually and potentially generate 4.1 million jobs.
They also felt that data on mobile phones will be the biggest driver in the mobile industry, with connections of high-speed 3G and 4G connections climbing from 107 million today to over 409 million by 2017.