Good white paper on Indian telecom market

The Shosteck Group has a very good study, The Indian Telecommunications Experience:  Its Relevance for the World, available for free (45 pages - registration required).  It's from a year ago (September 2004), but still very relevant.

In a very short period (mostly since 2001), India has substantially deregulated its telecom market and dramatically reduced (formerly onerous) tariffs and taxes. This has produced more competition (5+ significant players) than China and a dramatically faster rate of subscriber growth. India is still way behind China in total mobile phone subscribers (63M in India  vs. 373M in China as of August 2005). But India's rate of subscriber growth now exceeds China's at a comparable time (2000) in China's development.

Competition works!

The report documents the various steps taken in opening up the Indian telecom market and the more or less immediate impact of these steps.  It also gives a good summary of the state of play in telecom in India as of 9/2004.

Given the pronounced productivity benefits of telecom infrastructure investment (also see here), it would sure be nice if we could get this report in front of government officials in the rest of the developing world.