I don’t like to be optimistic. Like every “big” story, there are loads of failures to dampen your interest in the “revolution”. For one simple reason. Even if the potential is there, it is not touching our lives at all. A lot of bull shit is being bandied about the ‘emerging” India, all the while ignoring the ground realities.
Mobile tarriffs are supposed to be the “cheapest” in the world. Agreed. They are indeed cheap as compared to the dollars abroad. It still doesn’t make any iota of sense to extrapolate the Western data on to a third world nation. We are billed on a per minute basis; I am told that per second billing would perhaps introduce a lot of complications in the billing. Imagine the huge amount of unused minutes the companies earn when someone talks for just first 5-6 seconds of the minute.
We are mired in the regulatory maze, the final authority being vested by the babu drawing his/ her own ideas about the regulations without taking care of the customer’s interests. The companies have opaque ownership patterns, foreign investors are playing havoc with the security, a free for all access being awarded to Pakistanis and Chinese of all hues.
Broadband is still stuck in the “faster than a dial up mode” and for all the brouhaha about the long distance rates falling, the pulse rate on the calls has decreased considerably which more or less makes up for the lost “usurious” call rates of yore. We still pay the jazziah to the sarkari motherf*****s without any respite.
All these facts are swept under the carpet.
Mobiles indeed have been the forefront of the social change. No second thoughts about it. However, I’d be clearly betraying my class conciousness when I’d say that even a rickshaw puller has a mobile. Riding on the upfront costs as ‘administrative charges’, I fail to understand the value it creates. Even with a huge prepaid user base (most of it cooked up and riding on fake connections), it has failed to provide a succour to the common man as technology enabler.
Presently, most of the companies are relying on so called “value added services” to drive their revenues. Hand in glove with the media, they are creating specific niche of programming which entinces the people to loosen up their pockets. While it may be argued in terms of matter of choice and smart marketing, I do foresee a nation on mentally retarded idiots who are stuck in the old groove of being “good for nothing”.
Why does India’s demography excite the marketeers? Don’t you realise that our growing population is going to be a frigging nightmare of monumental proportions? Even if you are a die hard believer of Malthusian school of economics, the eventual downfall is out there in cold. Mobiles cannot be sold to half dead, naked, out of work populace. Which is indeed the story of today.
Presently, as per the estimates, 40% of the Indian land mass is covered. I don’t have the means to verify because I guess this ‘information’ is classified. Rural areas are still out of the ambit of any decent coverage and as I have argued in these columns ever and ever again- Internet connectivty shouldn’t be wireless.
Before I conclude, I’d like to quote from a write up that appears in The San Jose Mercury News 
link from Atanu’s write up)
“In the next five years in India, nobody is going to get a land line,” said Sanjay Swamy, a former Silicon Valley executive who is now chief executive of mChek, a Bangalore start-up whose software allows people to use their cell phones as credit cards.
Wow. We could give this idiot a benefit of doubt. Of course.
Even if we have fabcrication units in India, the next Intel/ AMD isn’t going to come out of India. You could have low end ‘assembly plants’ here and no one in their right minds are going to send across the plans for designing the next “dual core” crap.
Life is mean bitch. Sadly some people tend to forget that.
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