Date: 10/31/2007 11:27:29 PM

Mumbai: The dream of industry doyen late Dhirubhai Ambani of seeing a mobile in each Indian home remains unfulfilled as merely two out of 100 rural Indians avail of telecom services.

But this could soon change with Anil Ambani controlled Reliance Infocomm aiming to restructure its rural presence, adding 200 more towns in the country to its network spread across 4,000 odd cities.

The private telecom operator recently crossed the one million customer mark in rural and semiurban parts, is all set to expand rural telephony in a big way, he said, but declined to disclose the number of rural customers that the company is planning to add.

We have planned a major rural penetration programme, under which we would be adopting regioncentric approach to reach the rural customer with a bouquet of services, Reliance Infocomm Rural Marketing head, Sanjeev Govil said.

He said that there was a difference between marketing a product in rural and urban area. Reliance Infocomms data connectivity as well as RWorld services are already getting tremendous response in rural as well as urban areas.

We have had a good run with these services...infact in many areas these services have become our brand identity...in some of our markets people recognise the phone as TVwala phone...we plan to catch this nerve to enter the rural telephony in a big way, he said.

Presently Reliance Infocomm has a distribution network of around 1,500 distributors, which it aims to expand to cover each and every region of the country

Source: http://www1.economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1336215.cms