CM favours revenue sharing system

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, AUG. 6. The Chief Minister, Mr. N. Chandrababu Naidu, has urged the Government of India to give up the auction route for 3G wireless frequencies and go in for revenue sharing system.

Mr. Chandrababu Naidu made the suggestion while inaugurating a portal service (India sugaronline.com) on the sugar sector developed by NCS Infotech Limited here on Sunday.

He said he came to know that the Centre was considering the auction route which, he feared, would end up making communications expensive. It would also make the Indian business uncompetitive in the global market.

The first trade by the portal service was done by Mr. Sharad Pawar, MP, and President of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

The Chief Minister said IT-enabled services offered a vast potential of one trillion dollar turnover and 50 million jobs in the country. But adequate availability of bandwidth was the main problem. The international bandwidth available in India was only 325 megabytes per second as against the requirement of 10 gigabytes per second and demanded deregulation of the telecom sector for ensuring high quality communications infrastructure.

Mr. Naidu said the State Government would soon have its own portal so that it could provide all its services on the Internet. The number of Internet users would go up from 3.5 million in March 2000 to 16 Million in March 2003. The 40 million TV sets in the country could be converted into Internet facilities with a set of boxes.

The Chief Minister also spoke of the initiatives taken by his Government to utilise the KU band for providing distance education, E- governance and telemedicine.

Mr. Pawar said the overall position of the industry was grave with this year production from the 500 factories in the country estimated at 180 lakh tonnes and last year's surplus of 66 lakh tonnes. The domestic requirement being 150 lakh tonnes, the surplus of 99 lakh tonnes on hand posed a big problem.

He said the industry was required to be modernised. It was unable to compete in the global market as the productivity of the cane as well as recovery in advanced countries was much higher. The factories were also larger.

The Home Minister, Mr. T. Devender Goud, Mr. T. Subbarami Reddy, former MP, participated in the inaugural function. Mr. T. Nageswara Rao, Managing Director of NCS Group, which had set up the portal, welcomed. Prof. Ram Meghe, Chairman of the Maharashtra Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation, spoke.

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