Southern States - Andhra Pradesh   

Share phone service launched

By Our Staff Reporter

KALLEDA (Warangal dt.) Sept. 13. A landmark achievement in telephone service at this village of Parvathagiri mandal has been the use of shared phoning facility by subscribers, a thing which has been tried for the first time in the country.

There are four terminals for a group on a single wired line and an individual subsriber has to shell down just Rs. 12.50 a month. He/she gets around 30 free outgoing calls a month and can receive an unlimited number of incoming calls.

Called the `gram phone' project, the service is patented by an NGO, Rural Telecom Foundation (RTF), which will not only bear the installation cost of Rs. 400 a connection but will also provide the instruments to three out of four subscribers in a group who are not entitled to them from the BSNL. The group leader will maintain an account of the outgoing calls and prepare a demand out of the bill from the rest of the subscribers based on the calls made by them.

This low-cost telephoning has an inherent disadvantage in that the privacy of the subscribers is lost. A call can be tapped by all users at a time. Further, the subsidiary user has to visit the leader's house to make an outgoing call from the mother instrument.

Although in use for the past few months, the telephone service was formally launched in the village on Friday by the Union Minister of State for Railways, Bandaru Dattatreya. The RTF volunteer, E. Madan Mohan Rao, explained the features of the project to the Minister who promised to take up with the Central Government the need to replicate it elsewhere in the country. The Minister said this was indeed a revolutionising project in rural telephony.

The minister had a conversation over phone with Dr. Rafiq Dossani, Executive Director, Asia Pacific Research Centre, Stanford University, US, whose technical inputs went into the structuring of the programme.

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