Just how many telecom subscribers does India have? Recent government data put the total subscriber figure at 706.37 million at August end, an addition of 18.18 million during the month. Surely a reason to rejoice as we pace towards the 1-billion mark.
However, there is a dampener to all this. The department of telecommunications (DoT), with whom all operators file their monthly figures, revenues and other details, has discovered that the real subscriber figure is only about 450 million. How? There are two sets of figures the operators submit ? active customers, also known as visitor location register (VLR), and the home location register (HLR) or the inactive customer base which is largely a product of multiple SIM cards.
According to DoT officials, the VLR (or the active subscriber) figure at August end stands at 450 million. Of this, new additions were only 10 million, a lag of 8 million from the total monthly additions.
Obviously, the 59.63% tele-density reported at August end also gets revised downwards to 38% if the real subscriber base stands at 450 million. This means that there is much more scope for operators to grow and invest than what appears on paper.
This vast discrepancy has now prompted the government to mull release of both the sets of figures every month.
The government is also looking to replace tele-density with SIM penetration as the former does not give the real picture of phone penetration in the country because its computation is still based on the old land-line pattern when there was a remote possibility of households having more than one phone connection.
But how does such a big gap occur? The Indian telecom market is a crowded one with around 14 operators per circle and one of the cheapest tariffs in the world. In addition, the lifetime validity scheme introduced four years ago changed the entire scenario. Under lifetime validity, a customer?s pre-paid connection remains active after paying a certain amount of money even if it is not recharged regularly and there is no balance to make outgoing calls. Visualise a scenario: a non-resident Indian visits the country and buys a pre-paid connection with lifetime validity. He leaves within a week and returns a year later for a week.
His connection continues to be alive on the operator?s books though he is not actively contributing to either the company?s revenue or minutes of usage. Such user base is known as HLR ? the inactive ones.
But why the government has suddenly woken up and wants to release both sets of figures?
