As India wanders into the jaws of monopoly, the question is whether it can try to extract its pound of flesh from the monopolist.
A spectre is haunting India—the spectre of corporate monopoly. With VI bleeding subscribers and its finances in disarray (leading to the government taking a 36% stake in the firm), and BSNL barely managing to keep its subscriber base and unable to invest further in its network, Airtel and Jio now collectively account for almost 77% of wireless subscribers and 80% of all broadband connections in the country. With mobile number portability making subscriber loyalty a thing of the past, it is not unlikely that the Indian telecom market will end up in a duopoly. This degree of industry concentration is …
Rohit Chandra is an assistant professor at IIT Delhi’s School of Public Policy and also a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. Primarily a political scientist and economic historian, his academic work spans the areas of energy policy, state capitalism and infrastructure finance; he has spent the last decade studying the coal and power sectors.
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