Telecom War: Now It Is a Fight to Finish

This refers to your cover story on telecom ( The Battle for India, April 23). It was a colourful presentation of battles with eyes for their market supremacy. Though telecom is a sunrise industry, the effect of new generation mobile telephony services has not permeated strongly on economies due to policy aberrations, and scandals. While there are enough reasons against Reliance Jio for its present business pattern as it stands to subsume other competitors and restricts their industry share – resulting in merger of Vodafone and Idea and pushing down the ranking of Airtel, the blame cannot be apportioned only at the doors of Reliance Jio, as other operators prior to this evidently indulged in cartelisation and forced the users to unwillingly toe their lines. The preferential treatment of post-paid customers against prepaid users raises ethical concerns against such operators. There are mixed signals about the contents of services of these telecom companies. However, there cannot be two opinions about the implementation of economic objectives and business norms by all the operators. To protect the user interests from trap, the TRAI and the Centre have prohibited Jio’s three-month concessions. Any development in telecom business design should enable the customers to have the last laugh for lasting big business viability. B. Rajasekaran, Bangalore