Telecommunications policy in India: The political underpinnings of reform

In the mid-1980s India became one of the first developing countries to launch reforms in its telecommunications services; yet 10 years later little change had been introduced in the sector. Then in 1994 the government launched a new national telecommunications policy which has a considerable number of important features that are rather puzzling and uniquely Indian. This paper argues that the slow pace and uniqueness of India's telecommunications reform are to be explained in terms of the country's institutional arrangements. Radical telecommunications reforms move at a slow pace, take peculiar local twists or fail in implementation when (1) the state is highly permeable and vulnerable to demands from powerful, domestic interest groups that oppose changes in the sector; and/or (2) top government officials diverge and clash over the reform agenda, generally due to the head of state's lack of power

Socioeconomic implications of telecommunications liberalization: India in the international context

Telecommunications restructuring have evolved differently in Asia and Latin America. While Asian governments have moved cautiously in bringing changes to the sector, Latin American nations have implemented radical ownership and market transformations. The Indian telecommunications reform falls in between these two general regional trends. The choice of a high component of competition, increased private participation, and no privatization of the national carrier set conditions that will trigger unique socioeconomic effects. This article identifies and highlights the likely implications of the Indian reform on key economic and social issues, such as the cost of services, cross-subsidies, network interconnection, private investments, universal services, employment, and the possible rise of an information-intensive economy. It does so by comparing and contrasting the Indian experience with dominant reform strategies elsewhere in the developing world

Do Fish Perceive Illusory Motion?

Motion illusion refers to a perception of motion that is absent or different in the physical stimulus. These illusions are a powerful non-invasive tool for understanding the neurobiology of vision because they tell us, indirectly, how we process motion. There is general agreement in ascribing motion illusion to higher-level processing in the visual cortex, but debate remains about the exact role of eye movements and cortical networks in triggering it. Surprisingly, there have been no studies investigating global illusory motion evoked by static patterns in animal species other than humans. Herein, we show that fish perceive one of the most studied motion illusions, the Rotating Snakes. Fish responded similarly to real and illusory motion. The demonstration that complex global illusory motion is not restricted to humans and can be found even in species that do not have a cortex paves the way to develop animal models to study the neurobiological bases of motion perception