Calcutta somehow has been intrinsic to India’s telecom story. It was from the city to Diamond Harbour that the first experimental telegraph was started in 1850 in British India. Nearly a century and a half later, when mobile telephony landed on Indian shores, on July 31, 1995, it was to Jyoti Basu, the then chief minister of West Bengal, that Sukh Ram, the then Union telecom minister, made the first call, on Nokia cell phones.
When India gained Independence in 1947, the country had 150,000-odd telephone exchange lines, and state-run agencies under the posts and telegraph department manned the sector. The telephone remained a symbol of status rather than an object of utility for a long time, the number of connections growing from a mere 80,000 in 1948 to 980,000…