1 A Provisional Definition for the Cultural Last Mile

Naming the Problem: Or, Thinking Like The State

In 2007, the former Chairman of the Haryana Electricity Regulatory Commission, V.S. Ailawadi, was changing his wires.

An electricity regulatory body is typically the quintessential last mile solution provider. India’s Central Electricity Regulatory Commission describes its mission statement as  ‘intended to promote competition, efficiency and economy in bulk power markets, improve the quality of supply and promote investments’. A crucial part of its purpose is to ‘advise government on the removal of institutional barriers to bridge the demand supply gap and thus foster the interests of consumers’. In offering such advice, however, Mr. Ailawadi was clearly pushing the limits of the removal of institutional barriers.

‘The problem’, says Ailawadi’, ‘of last mile connectivity for ushering in the second telecom revolution’ can never be resolved as long as the ‘huge infrastructure created by BSNL and MTNL, with public money, comprising copper wire and optic fibre, remains under-utilised’.  ‘Various technologies like WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines (being) touted as alternatives’ cannot work because they are too expensive.  The only possible solution is for him to unbundle the local loop by BSNL/MTNL. Such unbundling would bring in competition for wireless applications and broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135 million mobile users of various service providers.

So why doesn’t the BSNL/MTNL agree? Mr. Ailawadi pours scorn in BSNL Chairman and Managing Director A.K. Sinha’s statement that ‘We have built the infrastructure and why should anyone else use it? Will they pay for the salaries of the employees?’. And goes on to say that only in India do we treat our PSUs like sacred cows. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has yet to come out with effective regulations for addressing the interconnection problems created by the incumbents, and the incumbents continue to delay links to their points of interconnection. The issue of congestion for Mr. Ailawadi is only due to the lack of adequate inter-connect points by BSNL/MTNL, although these state behemoths obfuscate this issue ‘on the plea of shortage of space or equipment’ (V.S. Ailawadi, ‘The Last Mile Problem in Indian Telecom’, Business Standard, January 23, 2007).

In a short statement then, Mr. Ailawadi thus sums up the three key contentions that this monograph will try to challenge and destabilize. First, that the only way delivery of key assets such as telecom to people at large, and especially people in India’s rural areas’, can happen in India is by poaching on underutilized state assets. However, India’s state agencies are pigheadedly not making these available to private players, for reasons that are as yet (at this stage of the argument) unknown. Secondly, the only way to understand state versus private players is through the language of antagonism: private players want access to state assets cheap, and state corporations want private players out since they will hardly pay state government employees their salaries.  But thirdly, and despite this pre-programmed antagonism, what brings both state corporations and private competitors startlingly together, the one topic on which both Mr. Ailawadi and Mr. Sinha appear entirely united, is their understanding that the Last Mile Problem constitutes purely a delivery mechanism. Their dispute is simply over who delivers better.

How, one may ask both, did the Indian state come to acquire such significant infrastructure assets, presumably dating back to times when the last mile had not even been envisaged in the way it is today? Was it that by some quirk of fate that developmental theory in India just somehow got it right in the instance of telecom? How did the state’s investment into major communication technologies over the centuries, presumably going back to telegraph wires, find it so uncannily become today’s major gatekeeper instead of sitting on massive and entirely obsolete technological infrastructure, as happened with terrestrial television and could have easily happened with telecom? Or is it that there is something wrong with the definition of the last mile, now revealed as committed to being a retrospective historical reconstruction, and further wedded to a state-shaped barrier to true access to ‘the people’?

Can it be, taking the argument further, that alternative technologies ‘like WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines’ are unfeasible not only because they are too expensive, but because providing alternative technologies to what the state has fails to address the real problem. Assuming for purposes of argument that Mr. Ailawadi’s wildest dreams came true and realized his ideal scenario of private players simply taking over BSNL/MTNL’s networks, would the new private corporations simply step into the shoes of the old state? Or would they need to significantly modify the technology to suit different ideological purposes? Or, can it be, there is no real difference, and it is simply a matter of who has charge? What are the pros and cons of what we shall now call technological bypassing – or finding new technologies to slip through state hurdles, as transistorization did in the 1960s to bring us commercial radio, the audio-cassette recorder did in the 1970s to become the quintessential smuggled object against which the Emergency would justify itself, or satellite television of the 1980s and the internet of the 1990s – as against appropriating state technologies? Is this an either-or? Is it, one may ask in the end, a matter of technology at all, or does the last mile problem mean something else entirely?