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Just a year before Berlin replaced Bonn as the German capital, I was there for a conference. My cabbie looked around, glanced at me and asked: Do you know the national bird of Germany? No! I said! Cranes! He replied. Which one? I asked. The Construction cranes, he retorted. I looked around. Sure enough, all I could see around were nothing but construction cranes. So overwhelmingly did they dominate the skyline! doweshowbellyad=0; Have you noticed the unmistakable change in the Indian urban skyline of late? Just stand atop a building in any urban part of India to know the difference. Up to seven service providers, all vying with one another to hog the skyline with their towers on which is mounted their transmitters to satiate the nation’s long suppressed need for telecommunications. Also Read RCoVL to merge 9 arms with itself FII investments in Bharti Airtel hit a block But it is one thing to feel great about this changing landscape, completely different if you look at the critical attendant issues. I am referring to the health hazard. Talk about the perils of using mobile phones has been around for years, with no conclusive evidence really. Often a claim is made that using mobile handsets is dangerous, and that it causes brain tumour, to be quickly debunked by a study saying how it is harmless for humans. It’s a different matter that these debunking theories, as claimed by some, are always at the behest of interested mobile companies. The threat of hazard posed by the towers, or at least its realisation, is of a more recent origin. But a Delhi-based NGO was alarmed adequately enough to move a PIL in the Supreme Court against their mushrooming growth and the attendant health risks. The court too, on its part, thought the matter was serious enough for it to seek responses from a bevy of government ministries. India can take a lead in the issue of mobile phones as a health hazard. What stops us from setting up a body of experts drawn from say the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and IISc to go into the technical-medical issues involved? Whatever might be the truth, the fact is that there is enough data to show that it is better to be cautious. In Australia, for example, as recently as May this year, a spate of brain tumours among staff forced a university to close part of its business school and test for radiation emissions from rooftop phone towers. The university discovered with shock that five of its employees had tested positive for brain tumour in the past month alone, in addition to two others in 1999 and 2001. Two were malignant and five were benign. While the university’s decision was greeted with shock by the business school employees, electrical workers who worked near the mobile phone towers were barred from working for fears of links between emissions and a “caner cluster”. The mobile industry, as expected, reacted that there was nothing to prove that the tumours were in any way linked to emissions from the mobile towers. Fair enough! There is nothing conclusive yet. But is it still not something that needs to be looked into?
Soaking in the results of the scorching growth pace the Dragon has set! When queried about why India cannot do what its northern neighbour can, he lamented the various issues which hammer (and sickle!) our growth initiatives. However, a World Bank official put things in perspective saying the problem with India was not too much democracy, but bureaucracy, adding “if authoritarian rule was the answer to economic growth, then North Korea would be manna and South Korea would be in the doldrums.” The Bank official hit the nail on the head, but only partially. One only needs to look around to see how China goes about building itself and compare it with what we do. Since telecommunications is the big story in both countries, a close look at the sector itself would provide more than just clues. Nokia, the Finnish GSM giant, is starting a new JV with China’s Putian Communications to develop technology for Chinese 3G mobile standard known as TD-SCDMA. The company, according to reports, would invest $111 million and hold 49% stake in the venture. This follows a similar announcement by Germany’s Siemens AG last year which committed over $100 million for a similar development with Huawei Technologies. Other big daddies of the mobile world, Motorola and Ericsson, too have made commitments to support the Chinese standard. It is no secret that China has been actively pushing for its own standard in 3G to not only foster development of its own telecom sector, but more importantly, to avoid the huge royalties they would be required to pay to the existing manufacturers. It is quite possible that China would eventually go with the uniform world standard, but this posturing would get it concessions which we in India can only dream of. An instance of this is already visible in the GSM market. Currently there are four European (Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel and Siemens), two American (Motorola and Nortel) and four Chinese (Huawei, ZTE, Datang and Putian) companies making GSM infrastructure. Wonder why, if the Indian market is among the most sought after market in the world, there aren’t any Indian manufacturer in the picture? The answer is simple. The Chinese seem to be governed by national interests alone. A high ranking official from a leading American telecom consultancy told me that the Chinese cleverly played their market card with the monopolistic European and American manufacturers.
