Dent to India’s Telecom Growth Story – Inflated Subscriber Numbers
We told you this earlier and DoT, after conducting an internal check found that most telecom operators were overstating their subscriber base.
For instance, in the month of April – telecom players announced the total addition of 38 crore subscribers while the real number stood at 30 crores!.
Take a look:
| Operators | Claimed Addition | Actual Numbers |
| Bharti Airtel | 9.4 Cr | 8 Cr |
| Vodafone | 6.8 Cr | 5 Cr |
| Reliance Comm | 6.4 Cr | 5 Cr |
| Idea | 3.8 Cr | 3.5 Cr |
| BSNL | 4.6 Cr | 3 Cr |
| Spice | 41L | 39L |
| MTNL | 41L | 29L |
- source
Why Operators Inflate Numbers?
The government awards additional spectrum solely on the basis of one’s subscriber base and that serves as an incentive for telecom players to inflate numbers and while all operators have deined the charge, do expect some of these (and the recent DoT-CBI case) to impact 3G auction dates.
Whose fault is it anyway? Operators or simply a case of wrong incentive mechanism?
An Apt Read: Indian Telecom- Misunderstood Benchmarks and Growth Potential?
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
After so many years of reforms, we are still not able to shake off the ghost of license-permit-raj .. Sad.