Reliance group chairman Mukesh Ambani will on Friday unveil his digital vision for India after Communications Minister Pramod Mahajan inaugurates Reliance Infocomm's network operations centre at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City at Navi Mumbai.

In an exclusive interview with Business Standard, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, said: "My vision really is to take India into the digital age faster than any other country, and make a digital way of life affordable to ordinary people."

The long-awaited project, which is powered by the young (the average age of its staff is 24), has the goal of making phone calls cheaper than a postcard and of serving over 640,000 villages across the country covering 100 per cent of the occupiable land mass.

Ambani was dismissive of the competition. "The three players here are nothing but multinationals -- Bharti is nothing but 21 per cent Singtel, Idea is run by AT&T and Hutchison... they effectively rule China. All these three companies have deep pockets. Compared to them, Reliance is a pigmy," he said.

"What we are doing now is setting standards for investment in India. In terms of saying, 'Boss, if you need to come and really lure the Indian customer, you can't do this with a 1965 model Fiat'. We think we will force each of these multinationals, if they want to stay in the Indian market, to compete in the marketplace."

Referring to the battle by global standards for mobile operators for what they describe as a level playing field, he said, "They go all around Delhi saying, 'Yeh roko, woh roko, yeh karo (stop this, stop that). Fundamentally, I believe that in this democracy of ours, no executive, legislature or judiciary can stop the delivery of value to customers."

Reliance Infocomm's plan to scale up operations is staggering. From an initial launch in 104 cities, the company plans on having a presence in over 600 cities within the next six months.

By March 2004, Ambani said, Reliance Infocomm would spread to the 647,000 villages in India.

Ambani was almost obsessed with the word "affordability." He described the Reliance group's foray into telecom as an attempt to offer a telecom version of the Maruti. He explained that Reliance Infocomm had worked backwards to make its products affordable.

"Cost is our prime driver. We had to keep a low cost base, but yet make money. We also require huge capacity. We cannot charge more than Rs 500 per month. At the same time, we also cannot afford a customer acquisition cost of Rs 1,500 a month like the GSM players. CDMA was the answer," Ambani said.

He said his infocomm plans had more in them than just offering customers cheaper mobile phones.

"On December 28, we will be empowering at least 2 million people with the option to get not only a mobile phone but also data connectivity on the mobile. They can watch films. They can actually get Pop3 mail. They can put in any programme. So your mobile becomes a small computer in your hand," Ambani explained.

"To scale up connectivity, you can take all your memory, all your storage and processing power back again into the network and the network becomes intelligent. You can keep applications on the network. So the network becomes your computer. That network delivers you fixed line as well as mobile (services). First, it delivers connectivity, and once it does that, you have voice, data and video. The way it changes your life is dramatic," he noted.

Continuing, he said: "If you move to enterprises, you leapfrog people who have never used a PC, and give them applications which enables them to plug in. Productivity goes up sharply. And when you talk of homes, it is really ethernet technology that we will take to homes. We are talking of how we can give you thousands of channels, and how we can make you interactive," he added.

Reliance Infocomm will be offering limited mobility services based on CDMA technology. It will offer Java-enabled CDMA handsets to get full connectivity, including voice communication and data applications.

"We also have Java on our mobile. Java is connected directly to a Sun (Microsystems) server, and that becomes a big computer and this (the CDMA set) becomes something like your terminal.

"Any Java application will now run on your handset. Tomorrow, it can become your credit card; we are working actively in terms of making this an enabled mechanism like your passport.

"By and large, this is basically a connectivity device which gives you initial connectivity but when you put all IT solutions on top of it, the growth potential and the ability to make life easier for an individual is tremendous," he said.

"In three years time, there will be 500 million phones with Java. Today there are very few, say, between 10,000 and 30,000.

"India will have millions of such handsets. We will have the facility to say, look we are the Java champions of the world. This is exactly what China's strategy is.

"You really have to find a place for leadership in the knowledge industry. This is how you create... at least it is an attempt to create something," Ambani added.