By trying to eliminate the huge cross-subsidy to domestic short-distance call traffic by over-charging on STD and ISD calls, the TRAI's new tariffs wouldhave helped business slash costs. The world over, businesses cut on travel costs and time through use of efficient communication methods such as data transfer through computers hooked onto telephone lines, the Internet. In India, however, with both STD and ISD exorbitantly priced, that's a business strategy which never had a chance. Even leased lines, so essential for businesses which require constant transfer of huge amounts of data-bits, cost a packet, putting them out of reach of most. The TRAI's new tariffs changed all this by slashing both STD and ISD rates. Even better, the dramatic slashing by over 80 per cent of charges for leased lines, will make Internet access so cheap that its use is almost certain to spurt -- to cite just one example, users will have to pay a mere Rs 96,000 for using a 64 kbps line for over 500 km as against the existing Rs 11.25 lakh. With the Internet cheaper and the demand for it all set to increase by leaps and bounds, so, correspondingly, will the gains from it. In the formof access to information, so vital for the progress of any economy. It's hardly a coincidence that all economies of the West that have grown fast have had cheap and efficient communication facilities.

What now? Clearly, the TRAI will be forced to lower the hike for the small users, especially in rural areas. To do so, it will have to re-introduce the very distortions in tariff structure that it tried to eliminate. It will have to once again start using higher tariffs for STD and ISD, and perhaps even the Internet, to subsidise the bills for the small user. In other words, forget what good economic sense dictates, politics still remains supreme. What the government doesn't realise is the devastating precedent it has set for all future governments. The purpose behind setting up regulatory bodies such as the TRAI, the Insurance Regulatory one, or the one on electricity, was to depoliticise the entire process of decision making in the country. To send a message that even the carefully thought out decisions ofsuch authorities can be rolled back, or kept in abeyance, is nothing short of disastrous.