The Hindu Business Line : Pitroda working on new profile for PCO booths

WITH Mr Sam Pitroda's intervention, the yellow cubicles that line the roadside proclaiming the STD/PCO booth is likely to see an overhaul in their operations.

Talking to presspersons at the Fourth Annual Baramati Initiative on ICT and Development at Baramati, the guru of televom said that he was working on an experiment which would increase the revenue of these booths.

One of the options is to utilise these cubicles for financial transactions where people can make payments to the electricity department or mobile phones etc. The operators in these booths will be given a `wallet' and the customers can use these wallets to punch in a secret code and conduct transactions. The booth operators would be paid for the number of transactions carried out, he said.

Mr Sam said that there are about six lakh booths which is a major source of employment for millions in the country and is presently suffering from revenue loss due to easy availability of telephones and mobile phones. He opined that the implementation of this model would be relatively easy as the majority of the infrastructure is already in place and only the supporting software needs to be developed.

Mr Sam said his company has already begun the trails in India, the first one being carried out in Mumbai in association with MTNL. More such trials are likely to be conducted in other cities, he said.

His company has already successfully launched a project on similar lines in Japan. He said currently only the computerisation of the existing systems is going on the country, which is incorrect. He stressed the need to re-engineer the existing processes before computerisation of the same.