Cell phone services in India have grown by leaps and bounds since the turn of the century. Competition is fierce and companies are adopting various practices to attract consumers and retain them. A variety of schemes and offers have been launched by cellular companies to lure the young consumers. This practice employed by the companies arouses the interest of researchers to understand the mind of the young people. This exploratory study presents the evolution of mobile telephony in India, and its perception by the students of Manipal. The economy and performance are the crucial factors in understanding the perception of the students of Manipal.

The Indian telecommunications industry, which, for long, was characterized by regulated monopoly enjoyed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), has entered the age of deregulated market competition in recent times. The attractiveness of the Indian market due to its low tele-density, high latent demand and burgeoning middle class, brought in some of the largest global telecom players, foreign institutional investors and major Indian industrial houses to invest in telecom, especially in the cellular services. Mobile phone usage has permeated across various economic classes as well as professional categories. The rapid change in consumer-behavior in this sector calls for curiosity and the intent to study at least one important segment, viz., the youth.

Till early 1990s, India had one of the most backward and stagnant telecom infrastructure facilities ridden with ineffective government regulations, inadequate financial resources and unaffordability for the common man. The Center for Development of Telecommunications (C-DoT) had already changed the telecom services in India for the betterment, in late 1980s by making inter-city customer-diallingalso known as Subscriber Trunk Dialling or STDavailable to most parts of the country. However, the sector saw trailblazing growth only since 2001, when mobile phone usage attained the growth stage.

Management Research Journal, Indian Telecommunications Industry, Center for Development of Telecommunications , C-DoT, Mobile Service Providers, Reliance Infocomm, Code Division Multiple Access, CDMA, Global System for Mobile Communication, GSM Technology, Video Telephony, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, BSNL, Indian Mobile Consumer Market.