RINGING IN THE NEW

From having 150,000 telephone exchange lines in 1947, India now is the world’s second-largest telecommunications market with 1,200 million telephone subscribers

- M.G. Arun

Calcutta somehow has been intrinsic to India’s telecom story. It was from the city to Diamond Harbour that the first experimental telegraph was started in 1850 in British India. Nearly a century and a half later, when mobile telephony landed on Indian shores, on July 31, 1995, it was to Jyoti Basu, the then chief minister of West Bengal, that Sukh Ram, the then Union telecom minister, made the first call, on Nokia cell phones.