Planned Unplanning: The Politics of Institutional Change and the Birth of India’s First Telecoms Regulator (1993-1997)

Abstract

In the 1990s the need for de-monopolizing India’s telecoms sector was driven by several factors. First, an immense quantum of capital investments -- some Rs 25,000 crore -- beyond the ability of the Indian state was required; second, there was immense pent-up demand for better telecommunications services and finally, the larger trajectory of India’s move from a market-dominating to a market-conforming economy (Murillo 2008) required the setting up of market competition in the telecoms sector. This would require creating a telecoms marketplace adjudicated by a telecoms regulator. Based on field work as well as original government documents obtained through the Right to Information Act, this paper documents and process-traces the political role of elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) bureaucrats in the “nodal ministry” of the Department of Telecommunications as these key individuals scripted the shift of discretionary power away from the DoT (which was the monopolist) to India’s first telecoms regulator: the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India. This paper demonstrates how the Government of India’s thinking evolved over the course of this “planned unplanning” by closely tracing the complete policy cycle from initial ideation to policy implementation. Nothing would weaken the power of the DoT as the setting up of the TRAI (Singh 1999; also see Mukherji 2009) did yet it was precisely the elite IAS bureaucrats at the helm of the DoT who had to do this. The politics of who, when, why and how this shift occurred during this critical phase of a complicated and irreversible institutional change in the sanctum sanctorum of the Indian state is the focus of this paper.