A Raja--what a minister

The new communications ministers' first press conference said it all. He thanked Dr Kalignar (Tamil Nadu chief minister and DMK party chief to the unitiated), prime minister Manmohan Singh and of course, Sonia Gandhi. So, we now have a telecom minister who owes his allegiance to a lot of people.

After all, Raja got the job because former communications minister Dayanidhi Maran's brother Kalanidhi Maran published a poll on the political heir of Karunanidhi that showed his elder son MK Azhagiri way behind. Family politics at its worst.

Raja simply denied that Dayanidhi Maran had done any work on the free roaming plan that is being launched on Karunanidhi's birthday (June 3). He said: "There was no exercise done prior to this on free roaming. I took the first step." That after Maran had claimed that he planned such a scheme soon after he lost the job.

Now that we have a new minister, he has decided to prepare a policy document on 3G that will be placed before Parliament. When? He has no answers to such complicated questions. He admitted that he has asked BSNL to negotiate with Ericsson for lowering the price for the 60 million line tender. The deal was done at $ 107 per line. Says Raja: "I have asked them to get it down to $ 100 or less per line." However, Raja is not bothered by the fact that BSNL's network is already choking. Each day's delay will mean that BSNL loses out to private operators.

Such things don't matter in the populous mind of Raja. If this is what the minister is planning then it is unlikely that 3G will happen even in late 2008, forget this year.

By the way, do not take Maran's name in front of Raja. A Tamil publication journalist who began asking something was shouted down by Raja.

A small piece of advice for the belligerent minister, who is otherwise an advocate. You may shout down at the media once. But, in case you are here for sometime it works both ways. After all Delhi is not Tamil Nadu where people are willing to give their lives for all kinds of otherwise nondescript politicians. It does not matter who picked you up for the post Mr Raja. Finally, it all happens on what you deliver.

One thing is clear. With this man as minister, life is going to be interesting.

P.S. I don't know whether this is something to do with DMK ministers. I was once at a conference where T R Baalu was supposed to speak. He landed on time and left on time. That was amazing for a minister. But, while leaving he did explain that he had to be on time to meet Madam!!

Roaming Freedom on BSNL

State-owned BSNL has gone ahead and slashed tariffs again. With hardly any scope to cut per minute rates, it has gone ahead and slashed roaming tariffs. The Free Roaming plan, is restricted to the post-paid subscribers of BSNL. Under this, on a Rs 550 plan, a subscriber can receive up to 300 minutes of incoming calls while roaming every month. That's a huge amount of free incoming calls. However, outgoing calls will be priced at 40 paise per minute to BSNL/MTNL subscribers and Re 1 per minute for other subscribers. Any BSNL/MTNL subscriber can opt for the new plan without any additional charges.

Obviously, the private operators will follow suit. It remains to be seen how quickly they will do so.

What is still not clear is how much revenues will BSNL lose with such a scheme. Well, so long as the scheme is restricted to post-paid subscribers, it will benefit roughly 6 million of BSNL's 28 million subscribers. But, then these are the subscribers who provide you the jam. It remains to be seen whether this scheme will result in an increased post-paid subscriber base.

As a colleague asked, when do we see free calling? Well that can and will happen provided value-added services take-off. Already voice is a commodity. Look out for the next announcement.