It was the mid-1990s, and I was doing my MBA in Delhi. Every alternate Sunday morning, I would walk 30 long minutes to a public call office (PCO) booth to take a token that enabled me to make a call back home that night at a quarter of the prevailing rates. Back then, phones were a luxury in India. While everyone craved a device to talk to loved ones, decades of government control of the telecom sector had not helped make this happen.
It was private enterprise that came to the rescue. The government, in a misplaced moment of generosity, had allowed private individuals to set up pay phones and offer communication services to people, while keeping a cut of the revenue. A thousand flowers were to bloom, and the country was soon dotted with phone booths. But unlike every other country in the world, which had coin or card-operated stand-alone payphones, India had its own operator-run, cash-friendly, receipt-printed model. This uniquely solved Indian problems.