India has awarded the first contracts under its open tender for telephone exchanges, and is sharing the work around in a big way. The winners will be eager to impress, because the country is embarking on a new programme to provide telephone service in all the country’s 600,000 villages by 1997. The winners of the current round, valued at $238m all told, are Alcatel NV in partnership with the Modi Group with orders for 510,000 lines. Hindustan Teleprinters Ltd was next with 194,000 lines, Siemens AG with 190,000 lines, L M Ericsson Telefon AB with 176,000, AT&T Corp with 167,000, state-owned Indian Telephone Industries Ltd with 164,000, Fujitsu Ltd with 162,000 and GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd with 137,000, the Economic Times reported.The government will issue offers of contracts after the companies confirm acceptance of the orders and they may not want to – under the rules set by the Department of Telecommunication, all vendors must match the price per line of the lowest bidder, which was the Modi-Alcatel team, which was also rewarded with the biggest share of the business. The price it bid was the equivalent of $136.30 a line. Announcing the crash plan to bring telephones to the villages, Communications Minister Sukh Ram said at the Electronics India trade fair being held in New Delhi that great opportunities were open to foreign investors under the telecommunications sector liberalisation announced in May, because 3m people are waiting for telephones, and it will cost at least $17,400m to clear the waiting lists. The Department of Telecommunication wants 7.5m new lines in the five fiscal years ending March 1997, Reuter reports, and some 2.5m more lines would be needed every year for the government to keep its promise of phones on demand by then, which is why it is seeking private investment – $3,800m for 2.5m lines a year, and $1,290m to make the rural connections.
