The lightning-paced growth of India’s mobile telephony market would unleash socio-economic forces that threatened to overwhelm the country’s institutions, one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies has warned.

Ben Verwaayen, the chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, the French telecommunications company, said on Monday that the extension of mobile internet services among the world’s second most populous nation was a “journey into the unknown” that would feed a tide of rising expectations.