Trring!
Trring!
STARTING with the
decade of the seventies in particular, Nepal’s telecommunications sector has made
rapid strides. The strides got bigger after 1990 with the introduction of policies to
engage the private sector in more and more telecom infrastructural endeavours. The
government opened the door for private sector involvement in basic, cellular and
value-added services. But despite these leaps, many telecom challenges remain with large
parts Nepal, especially rural Nepal, continuing to have no access to even the basic
telephone services. For instance, some 534 VDCs in the eastern region, accounting for
about 25 per cent of rural areas of the country, are still without access to any telephone
services. It is in this context that the agreement the other day between His
Majesty’s Government and the World Bank for a USD 22.56-million loan for financing
the Telecommunication Sector Reform Project assumes a high significance. The project
supports the licensing of a private rural operator through a market mechanism to provide
telecom services in those 534 VDCs. The loan is bound to give a boost to the ongoing
reforms under which the second private cellular license was awarded in March 2001, a
private national operator was selected to provide service in May 2001 and over 65 new
operators were authorised to provide value added services such as Internet, paging and
data transmission.
Many developing
countries around the world have gone for, and implemented with success, telecom projects
that particularly targets the rural population, out of the realisation that telecom
services can be a vital factor in economic and social uplift of the rural poor whose road
to better living standards are often hampered by their inability to access telecom
services and the consequent failure to be empowered vis-à-vis the requisite information.
A farmer’s groping, for example, for the market prices of crops would certainly be
considerably eased if he had an easy access to such information via some telecom service.
Lack of telecom services in the rural hinterland also means that potentialities of the
rural poor in engaging in income-generation activities through access to telecom services
are also held back. It only takes a look at how some Bangladeshi rural women have found
themselves economically empowered via their engagement in selling telecom services, to
appreciate the importance of telecom services in rural areas. The project, according to
the World Bank, also aims at providing access to phones to the rural people and empower
Nepalese women there with business opportunities. Competitiveness in the telecom sector by
bringing in more private sector players and a policy that directs telecom services more
and more to rural areas of Nepal are indeed the right strategies. Let there be more
private players in the telecom sector and, more particularly, let the rural Nepal hear
more trring! trring!
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