More than 218 million of India's 1.1 billion people are already under the mobile umbrella. The number has risen astonishingly quickly from less than 2 million in 1997, thanks to an expanding middle class, strong competition among the major operators and the world's lowest tariffs.

But there is yet some way ahead. While telecom density is about 55 percent in urban India, it is only 6 percent in rural areas.

The Indian government is committed to pushing the subscription base to 500 million by 2010, with at least 100 million subscribers from rural areas.

Part of this push requires more investments in rural areas. It also urges vendors and operators to introduce products and services better suited to the rural market, including more content in regional languages, payment packages suited to low-income families and the introduction of alternative energy sources to make up for the lack of adequate power supplies.

Mats Granryd, managing director and head of Ericsson Market Unit India and Sri Lanka, says: "As we go into the relatively uncharted territory of rural India, operators and vendors have to be extremely innovative. This will include areas such as enabling e-governance services and micro-finance packages on mobile broadband platforms."

Granryd says that what marks out the Indian market is how closely intertwined mobile subscription growth is with general socio-economic development. "If we succeed in achieving the target set by the government of India, we will not only be pushing up mobile usage rates but also creating new jobs and improving access to information and governance, all while investing in alternative fuels," he says.

Ericsson plans to meet the target with a range of solutions. These include, on one hand, the use of alternative energy sources such as solar panels and bio-fuels and, on the other hand, innovative solutions such as the Coverage Expansion series of radio base stations and the exclusively designed, 2111 main-remote base station. Both deliver energy-optimized coverage, either by using cost-efficient energy sources or coverage with fewer sites requiring less energy on a network level. This ensures coverage of large geographical areas, a priority in low-density, remote, rural India.

While some of these solutions are already up and running on existing GSM and EDGE platforms, much more is expected when the government ratifies a 3G policy and licensing for operators later this year.

P Balaji, vice president for Marketing and Strategy at Ericsson India, says: "In the country's villages, mobiles are not just a tool for communication but also income-enhancing tools. So fishermen use them to find out which market may be the most lucrative for selling their catch while farmers use mobiles to find out more information on crops.

"Together with operators, vendors need to circumvent the challenges posed by difficult terrain, lack of electricity and low incomes in order to create opportunities for growth."

With good overall macroeconomic indicators, a demographic dividend in the form of a large proportion of youth, healthy competition among operators and vendor consolidation, the conditions seem set for rural India to achieve the target of 100 million subscriptions by 2010.