Indian Telecommunications

An Overview

History

Telephone services in India begun in a small scale with the commissioning of a 50-line manual telephone exchange in 1882 in Kolkata. This was less than five years after the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. India had approx. 82 000 telephone connections at the time of independence (1947) and by 1984 the number of connections had slowly risen to 3.05 million. India's telecom network was notoriously unreliable and only available to a small section of households along with the corporate sector. The telecom sector was a government monopoly until 1994 when liberalisation gradually took place. Cellular service was launched in November 1995 in Kolkata.

Expanding Network

The Indian telecom industry has grown rapidly during the last few years but has witnessed a substantial fall in growth more recently. India has the third largest (based on the total number of fixed/mobile subscriber lines) telecom network in the world and the second largest mobile network with 1.2 billion subscribers in May 2021.

Mobile

The mobile subscriber base has decreased in recent months as is the case in the number of landline subscribers. Overall telecom subscriber penetration had increased to 90 % by the beginning of 2018. Major brands sold include Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung, Realme, Vivo, Oppo, Lenovo and Micromax. Around 70 million smartphones were sold in India in H1/2021.

Telecom Manufacturing

Oppo, Xiaomi and Samsung are among the telecom companies that have set up assembly/manufacturing facilities for the production of mobile phones and other telecom equipment to cater to India's growing telecom market and exports too.

Mobile handsets worth around ₹ 1.8 trillion and 290 m units were manufactured/assembled in India in 2018/19. Mobile handset exports reached ₹ 112 bn in 2018/19 exceeding the value (₹ 100 bn) of mobile handset imports to India.

Mobile Network Statistics

India's Largest Wireless Telecom Operators (Apr 2020)
Operator	Wireless Subscriber Base (millions)
Reliance Jio	389
Bharti Airtel	323
Vodafone / Idea	315
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL)	120

Wireless Subscribers (in millions) in Delhi, Mumbai & Kolkata (May 21)¹
City	Total	Operators
Delhi	54	Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, MTNL
Mumbai	37	Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, MTNL
Kolkata	26	Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, BSNL

¹ Source: TRAI

SOME FACTS & FIGURES ON INDIAN TELECOM

Number of telecom (mobile and landline) subscribers: 1 170 million (Feb 2023)
Number of wireline subscribers: 28 m (Feb '23)
Number of wireless subscribers: 1 145 m (Feb '23)
Number of broadband subscribers: 839 m (Feb '23)
Overall teledensity: 8440/1000 inhabitants (Feb '23)
More telecom at the Department of Telecommunications network status page.
Smartphone market (shipments in 2022) - 144 m

Currency: 1 USD equals approx. 83 Indian Rupees (₹) / May '23