The 200 million people in India who are officially hungry were probably not that interested in the successful launch of the country's uncrewed moon mission Chandrayaan-1 in November .
And with India 66th out of 88 in the UN's Global Hunger Index, the forthcoming sell-off of India's 3G spectrum is likely to generate even less excitement.
More than 70% of Indians live in rural areas; and that is where most of the 200 million hungry people live. Though Mahatma Gandhi once said "the soul of India resides in rural India", its mobile subscribers definitely do not.
Untapped gap
The latest figures from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRIA) say mobile penetration in rural areas is less than 13%, compared with 73% in urban areas, a gap that threatens to hold back the development of India as a global superpower.
But there are hopes that 3G will address this imbalance. Vishal Gondal, the CEO of Indiagames, one of the country's biggest mobile games publishers, hopes the next stage of mobile networks will open up this untapped market.
"2G networks helped spread voice and SMS across rural India and has transformed that society. 3G will do the same by accelerating the spread of high-speed broadband in rural India. 3G cards will mean such services as e-education, video, e-governance and telemedicine that were not reaching rural India because of lack of bandwidth will see a surge," he says.
Mobile penetration matters to any would-be superpower. In December 2008 a TRIA paper on India surmised that a 1% higher mobile subscription rate would mean a £140 rise in GDP per capita.
Some global analysts are even more bullish about prospects for rural India. McKinsey Global predicts that in 2028 the rural Indian market will be larger than those in South Korea and Canada today. It puts the size of the 2028 rural market at $577bn - more than four times the size of today's urban Indian market.
Furthermore, as mobile penetration in urban areas becomes saturated, operators have launched extensive marketing programmes to attract rural takeup.
And the market is booming. TRIA says India's operators added 10.35m new mobile accounts in November, taking the total to 336.1m. That's a rise of 38% on the preceding 12 months and almost 300m more than there are landlines in India.
Such surges in subscribers have also led to a lack of spectrum for the existing big operators. According to a source at one of India's largest operators, 3G licence-winners are more likely to use the spectrum to service future 2.5G subscribers.
Sudhir Gupta, who co-wrote a TRIA report on how to attract 100 million more mobile broadband subscribers in rural India, says 3G will increase mobile broadband to rural subscribers -but these services will initially launch in urban areas.
"The forthcoming 3G launch will help to provide faster provision of broadband and customised data-centric applications to rural subscribers. However, the operators will start to roll out their 3G networks to high ARPU [average revenue per user] subscribers who reside in the urban areas," he says.
Smallest shacks
Operator advertising is everywhere in India, not just in big cities. On the shacks in the smallest villages, Airtel, Vodafone and Reliance signs are ubiquitous.
And the Indian government seems committed to opening up this market. Telecom service providers have to pay 5% of gross revenues into a Universal Service Obligation fund for rural initiatives.
Other government-supported policies include forgoing the need for permission to build mobile masts up to 40m tall.
The government is also considering subsidised rural-only MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators), while the service providers report that of 593,731 villages, 407,112 have mobile coverage.
Already, the government has issued licences to two state-owned operators, BSNL and MTNL, with the latter launching trial 3G services last month.
Other operators ready to join in the stampede will look to grab licences in the "circles" of urban areas such as Mumbai and Delhi and think about the rural areas later - and therein lies the problem.
Successful 3G operators will concentrate on areas where there is already high mobile penetration. There are billions of pounds involved in setting up 3G structures in the most accessible of regions, let alone the countryside.
And for villages without a regular electricity supply, mobile users are more concerned with longer battery life than power-sapping snazzy features.
So the operators are going to do 3G their way and will use the opportunity to increase their ARPU in the major cities - and that's after they top up their subscriber base with the extra spectrum.
For India's rural community - in spite of the government's efforts - it may be some time before they attain the same services as urban users. In fact, they may as well whistle at the moon.
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