Connectivity enabled quality grapes from Narayangaon to replace South African grapes from the shelf of Sainsbury in the UK as early as in 1993.

volcano. No excuses. We got it all wrong. Ashliltha (pornography) was another concern of our lawmakers. A public admission that “I goofed up” was the saving grace to set things right and produce a world-class system, and envy of the world. So much so the Vice Minister of China visited VSNL in 1996 to learn the tricks of the trade. We were the third Asian country to introduce the internet after Japan and Hong Kong, ahead of China and Singapore.

The manifestation of our world-class service came to the fore in Mumbai at a Nasscom conference in February 1996, when there was a huge rush at the VSNL stall to see and learn what the internet was all about. That was an eye-opener. In fact, the crowds were massive and when the then Telecom Commission Chairman (the motive force to get internet in India) wanted to visit Nehru Centre to see for himself the latent potential of the World Wide Web, we decided not to clear the crowd so that he could get a feel of the internet pulse. The rest is history.

So what impact did internet connectivity have in the initial stages, the decade of 1991-2000?

It enabled quality grapes from Narayangaon to replace hitherto South African grapes from the shelf of the likes of Sainsbury in the UK, as early as in 1993. Narayangaon is a mofussil town near Pune that is known for exportquality grapes. However, the farmers could not market them due to the lack of connectivity. They had to depend on Pune to send and receive their orders and invoices. The connectivity made communication faster and easier and opened the flood gate of the global market for them.

Roaming around the streets of Jodhpur in January 2000, we walked into a store called Maharani. They were selling quality ethnic wares to The Habitat owned by Late Sir Terence Conran in London. We were wandering around the store, picked up a few items. While making payment by credit card, this entrepreneurial owner girl looked at me suspiciously and in a very circumspect manner. I was a bit uncomfortable, but suddenly she burst into a smile and asked if I was the one who brought the internet. I modestly nodded. She was overjoyed. She narrated how Sir Terence used to visit them, at times twice a month to pick wares. Being a designer himself, he gave suggestions, which he now does online, making an odd visit once in six months.

Why was the uptake slow?

The naysayers keep highlighting that internet interconnectivity was slow to pick up because of the VSNL monopoly. This is far from the truth and it is important to analyze the statistics, the business environment and several other factors before drawing a conclusion.

When we introduced the internet, there were only 35 million fixed lines in India and the country did not have cellular phones; cellular services were introduced two weeks before the internet. Getting a telephone connection itself was a tough task. On the digital front, there were no smartphones, no content, except browsing and barely 36 kbps speed under the EDGE system. Besides, the most important piece missing in this jigsaw puzzle was the devices – except desktops and laptops.

So how much of internet penetration could one have achieved with those 35 million fixed lines? Not a lot to be very honest, especially since the country was constrained by the lack of availability of devices. Therefore, something else had to be done. Unfortunately, both the internet and cellular services suffered in the initial years. They were expensive and unaffordable for Hoi polloi, mass markets. They had elitist overtone.

The situation was corrected by the NDA 1 government led by Late Atal Bihari Vajpayee with the release of the New Telecomm Policy in 1999. He brought a drastic change in the licensing policy that reduced the upfront license fee as a percentage of annual gross revenues. This major relief opened up the floodgate in both cellular and connectivity space, which brought down the tariff significantly. However, cellular connectivity was of no help in driving the proliferation of internet services in the early days; it only happened after smartphones were introduced alongside 3G services.