The liberaliser
Telecom reforms or disinvestment, Vajpayee stood firm. He believed that India needed a new way of doing things and backed his ministers to do the right thing. He also taught India to think on a different scale, be it with projects like the Golden Quadrilateral or with the nuclear tests
The telecom revolution, in opening up the sector and corporatising BSNL (which forced private players to slash call rates), fundamentally changed the way Indians communicated. At the heart of this revolution was Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's belief that India needed a new way of doing things. When we decided to liberalise the telecom licence regime, many ministers were opposed to it. Some coalition partners too opposed it for their own reasons. But Vajpayee stood firm. Our objective was to abolish licensing and bring in competition. And we used BSNL and MTNL to beat the private operators into lowering prices. What was over Rs 14 a minute for an incoming call came down to a few paise per minute after we went ahead with the reforms.
