Skip to footer

Can India's spectrum auction help cap its budget blowout?

The Indian government's wireless spectrum auction this week is good news for telecom, an industry tainted by a recent corruption scandal.

|
Danish Siddiqui/Reuters/File
A man checks his mobile phone as he walks past a shop displaying the Vodafone logo on its shutter in Mumbai, India, January 15, 2014.
  • By Joseph Schatz Correspondent

The Indian government’s wireless spectrum auction this week has been good news for a telecom sector that was until recently shadowed by a corruption scandal – and a boon for the government’s bottom line.

The government has already raised about $8 billion in the multiday auction, which started Monday and is still going. The money should help contain the country’s budget deficit, which is currently around 5 percent of GDP, or roughly $90 billion. “It does help the government – they are getting a fair bit of cash from this,” notes our correspondent on the ground in Mumbai. “What’s worth noting is that it’s pretty competitive.” Indeed, the hotly contested auction is a major turnabout from the government’s last auction, which saw only one company participate. With base prices lower this time around, the auction has drawn big players like Reliance Jio, Vodafone, and Bharti Airtel. It’s part of a broader government effort to revive investment in the sector. India’s telecom market is the second-largest in the world, but ... For the rest of the story, continue reading at our new business publication Monitor Frontier Markets.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Can India's spectrum auction help cap its budget blowout?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2014/0206/Can-India-s-spectrum-auction-help-cap-its-budget-blowout
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe