The Drift towards Monopolization in Indian Telecommunication: The Rise of Ethnic Crony Capitalism

About the Talk:
What are the drivers of monopolization of India’s telecommunications sector? This study shows when ethnicity-based crony capitalism takes hold of the government, rent-seeking can be expanded to promote monopolization on an unprecedented scale. Ethnic bondsowing to trust between a business house and a populist leader can systematically produce unusual cooperation between the leader and the co-ethnic business house. Ethnicity-based cronyism deployed the historical institutional path of drift to promote monopolization. Since rival businesses would oppose monopolization, the Modi goverment merely interpreted rules differently to favor one company without any legal change. The talk deals with three issue areas: cheap licenses, predatory pricing, and reduced interconnect charges that enabed Jio to propel its meteoric rise. The study holds that policy ideas can be adjusted to a historical path depending on the power of veto players and the ambiguity of rules to drive a new policy paradigm – monopolization. 

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Seyed Hossein Zarhani is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute. He is currently working on his habilitation, focusing on the political economy of regulation in India. His book, Dynamics of Governance and Development in India: A Comparative Study on Andhra Pradesh and Bihar after 1990, was published by Routledge in 2019 and 2021.