Green telecom initiative in India

Mobile telecom growth in India is more than 100 million new subscribers annually and will reach about one billion subscribers by 2014 principally fuelled by explosive growth rates in rural areas since mobile telecom has become one of the primary necessities and an important tool in addressing the "digital divide". However, this has created grave concerns about the carbon footprint from the use of diesel powered electric generators for basestation sites, high levels of electromagnetic radiation potentially affecting health, and overall infrastructure capital and operational costs in remote rural areas. The technical challenges and the requirements of establishing sustainable low cost mobile telecom infrastructure in rural areas in India are similar to other emerging markets. Indian green telecom solutions based on suitably modified mobile network deployment architectures are equally valuable to all emerging markets that have large rural populations and poor availability of electricity grid power. This paper describes an approach for achieving Green Mobile Networks in rural India based on the Indian national initiatives "Towards Green Telecom" as per the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of India\´s (TRAI) Recommendations.