It's 200 million subscribers now

February has been the fifth month of adding 6 million more new mobile subscribers. Not surprisingly, the GSM guys added 4.87 million, while the CDMA guys added 1.15 million. So, India has 154 million mobile phone subscribers. Add on the fixed lines and we have more than 200 million telephone subscribers.

Now that's not what the analysts have been saying.I clearly remember meeting a Yankee Group analyst nearly a year ago who was quite convinced that India will soon slip from adding 5 million subscribers a month. "You guys are simply scraping the bottom of the barrel," is what he said. That was a year ago. Today we are adding 6 million plus a month without a glitch. Mind you, the dispute over state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd's (BSNL) tender for 60 million lines is yet to be sorted.

Ironically, most of the global analysts land up in India with pre-conceived notions about the country, its poverty, lack of infrastructure etc. So how will poor people go ahead and buy a phone, then pay for services every month? How will an operator make money?

Well, you can pick up a second/third-hand mobile phone from the streets of any major city for around Rs 900 ($20). Yet you can pay this off in easy instalments spread over a year. Two, tariffs are at Re 1 a minute. With schemes like the Life Time Mobile you can keep receiving calls without making a call for six months. available that's not an issue. Also, while Bharti and Hutch are profitable, the world's largest mobile company by revenues, Vodafone is in the red. No wonder Voda is here in India on its own finally.

So guys, the real thing that you don't know sitting in cubicles across the Pacific is that Indians love to talk. Also, with literacy levels being where they are, it makes eminent sense to have a mobile phone as opposed to an Internet-enabled PC. Two, with incomes rising, a whole new set of people are getting connected. Three, Indians learnt about recycling long before the West. So a mobile phone is passed down from the bread winner to his wife and then on to the driver and the servant.

So, do we head to seven million new connections a month? I won't be surprised if that happens by the end of 2007.