Day: December 22, 2005

[Continued from Part 2.]

The recent performance of India’s private sector has underlined an important economics lesson, that competitive markets work where too often the command and control system founders. Within your arm’s reach is a device which is a miracle of modern technology—the cell phone. It took the government telecom monopoly 45 years—from 1951 to 1996—to install around 14 million land lines. Between 1996 and 2000, with the liberalization of the telecom sector, India’s installed capacity doubled to around 30 million lines. In the next five years, India’s telephone companies added another 90 million lines (of which 70 million were cell phone lines.)
Continue reading “Lee Kuan Yew on India – Part 3”