Hi, I’m Ravi Bapna, associate professor of information systems at the Indian School of Business. I also direct the centre for IT in the networked economy out here and I’m going to be talking to you today about India’s red hot mobile telephone industry, a technology that’s had a significant social and economic impact on the livelihood of people like the taxi drivers right here behind me.

This is the fastest growing mobile market in the world with 170m subscribers today, adding almost 6.5m new subscribers every month, and yet the current tele-density or penetration covers only 18 per cent of the population. So the projections are by 2010 we are going to have close to 500m subscribers and that’s what really makes it interesting for a large number of global players to come and take a closer look at what’s happening in the Indian mobile industry.