7 - Pro-Liberalization Transnational Business and High-Tech Services

Summary

This chapter shows how the perceived strategic value of high-tech, globally integrated sectors, represented by telecommunications, for neoliberal development interacts with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The resultant regulated governance by the Indian government of telecommunications are the micro-institutional foundations of Indian-style capitalism undergirding the globalization and development of such industries disconnected from the post-Independence legacies of the Indian nationalist imagination. The cross-time sector and company case studies show the initial introduction of competition in telecommunications occurred during Big Bang Liberalization supported by pro-liberalization industrial stakeholders disconnected from the existing telecommunications bureaucracy. Today a central-level ministry makes policy and an independent regulator enforces the market entry and business scope of a state-owned fixed-line operator and fiercely competitive mobile carriers and value-added service providers. The role of the state in market coordination and the dominant property rights arrangements vary by subsector as a function of interacting strategic value and sectoral logics. Nehruvian interpretation of Gandhian Swadeshi self-reliance has retained bureaucratic oversight of the development of state- and privately-owned equipment makers, which concentrated on rural automatic exchanges and low-tech inputs until the dominance of Chinese competition pivoted focus to indigenous development in new generation mobile consumer and terminal telecommunications equipment.