I have been writing on Indian Telecom for over a year now on Broadband Blog and contributing to Techwhack at the same time. You can get a wider range of thoughts and ideas on the said issue on these channels under various categories.
As for me, I am another Indian. Whats the difference between me and you then? I chose to speak out against the established system instead of keeping quiet and twiddling my thumbs. Indeed, it gives me enough reasons to be sane about the whole issue.
It doesn’t really matter to the high up’s as for the adverse publicity on the media channels. They are all used to it. Hence, the impact of the blog would be minimal. Even the news channels which might want to link here to these issues, would think twice to air something about their advertisers. Or not think at all.
Why only telecom then? There are many other issues that need to be highlighted. We don’t have enough schools; public health care infrastructure is crumbling; the economy is going haywire despite what the Harvard educated elite might claim. At the back of these issues, we have the “foreign component”, both in the governance as well as the economy leading the nation to ruin. Why then only telecom?
It’s about Digital Divide. This can roughly be described as lack of access of telecommunications to the underpriveleged. Read it as the unknown “common man” or “aam aadmi” who has become a byword in election manifesto. It is for the “common man” elections are fought, it is for the “common man” that we are forced to pay double taxes, tax on tax (called as cess) and it is again for the “common man”, reservations bogey is raised. It’s more like the Emperor’s clothes. Though no one has the guts to speak out. And it’s the same “aam aadmi” that the Government F***’s royally.
Indian Telecom is going through unholy alliance of cartelised operators and powerful business interests who have enough money power to lobby in the corridors of power. It’s about bloody turf wars and the unknown hands of the bureaucrats who make or break regulations with a twist of their pens. It’s about denial of information and opaque power structures which all are run in the name of “common man” being served.
It’s indeed a shame that mainstream media hardly touches these issues. It isn’t expected out of the fourth estate that calls itself as the “watchdog”; perhaps there is a truth in assertion that media has “gone to the dogs”. Indeed a BIG shame to them.
The blog is a humble attempt to get in my own opinionated views about these pressing issues. If it makes some impact, I d only attribute it to Divine intervention and nothing else.
