Another watered down budget; Manmoron and his team of financial advisors are clearly at a loss for ideas. There is a crying need to reduce the indirect taxes on the products that is consumed by one and all. This would only lead to more consumption which is better for the economy than persisting with the present trends which would lead to inevitable recession. Much of the “growth” of the economy has been from the services sector with almost 15% coming from this supposedly “scorching pace”. However, the supports of the economy, namely manufacturing and consumption has slumped. This has only lead to inflationary pressures and our massive dependence on oil has only worsened with ballooning oil bill.
The finance minister (may his tribe decrease) has introduced a “National Calamity Contingent Duty” on the mobiles; they are bound to get more expensive by about 1%.
Perfect timing eh, Mr Moron?
Once in a while most of these companies get the urge to “do something”. Having failed to live up to the expectations of it’s customers in the retail broadband business (where it still markets 128k as “broadband”), it’s executives got in a collective swooning and whipped themselves in a frenzy. Anil Ambanis of the world were impressed and gave their assent to change the name of their businesses. Reliance Globalcom is the name of their “new integrated enterprise” where they give the same shitty experience to their existing “idiots of customers” but with a fresh new name 
If you look around, Tata had changed their brand to Tata Communications with perhaps the same intention. It hasn’t changed the focus of their work, their ethos and continue to dupe a whole mass of suckers who have no clue as to what broadband really is all about.
This article in Outlook shakes with the fury of rattle snake. It makes a lot of noise but in the end relates only a blame game between the players. Each one squarely blames either the high tariffs or government policies. TRAI is mentioned for good measure and the fact that it listens only to consumer groups but not the customers alone.
The eternal wait for decent connectivity would sadly remain eternal.
P.S. Outlook has a lousy web design and does not conform to W3C standards at all.
I got a call from an executive offering me 1 Mbps unlimited for 2222/- per month. He said that this scheme was for “select” priveleged customers and is valid for a short while. Oh gosh. 1 Mbps unlimited..!
This only confirms my suspicions. Airtel had used the 512k unlimited as a bait and wanted to “test market” the response to the “top up” offers. This, in my opinion, only serves to entince more people towards the unlimited offerings. I feel that the current price for 1 Mbps is over inflated and it should be brought down to about 1000/- price band. Trust me, the whole existing subscriber base of MTNL would want to sever off their private parts to get hooked on to something like that. As if it really makes a difference….
Airtel has the moolah and they have the network. They can easily take the initiative and soft launch it. As I had mentioned before, word of mouth publicity would do more good. They can upscale their networks in response to the demand, schedule customers (like me) who deserve more bandwidth because suddenly I have discovered that You Tube videos stream so smoothly on the new bandwidth and it has been a discovery of all sorts watching those re runs of Tom and Jerry cartoons.
If only these morons listened….they’d get a very positive feedback from this blog. I promise
Of course, the scheme gets extended to whole of the country where Airtel has it’s presence.
The whole Internet access in India had been grounded to a sudden halt due to cable cuts across the middle east. Nothing has been proved as yet; no one knows the reason behind this sudden blackout. A few conspiracy theories have been floated; the most credible appears to be this. If this is to be believed, US is supposedly behind these “attacks” and thus short circuiting our Internet access. Just because the morons are pissed off from couple of muslim nations, they resort to knee jerk reactions by resorting to cable cuts.
I usually don’t make political statements on this blog but long timers here would already know that my political leanings are towards far right. For all the abuses that have been heaped on Narendra Modi, none of it has actually stuck on to him because much of it was pure BS.
He has single handedly transformed Gujarat and propelled it to the path of prosperity. The pseudo secular mafia was at loss for words and the mainstream media started blaming the people of Gujarat for their choice! How preposterous can it get? Messrs Sardesais, Barkha Dutts, Roys et al were spearheading the “remove Modi” campaign. It only goes on to prove their ignorance of the fact, their shallow understanding of the polity and futility of thier trade. At best, they can wow a certain section of the drawing room chatterati over a glass of whisky.
Nevertheless, I am linking the main stub to the post that appeared in Offstumped; a good blog dealing with issues of national importance. Infact, one of the few topical blogs that I follow on a regular basis.
This write up was “motivated” by Modi’s speech in Chennai. You could watch the parts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6); the last part clearly details the initiatives taken by Modi for spreading broadband in the rural areas. Thats the kind of commitment to governance that we need. For those who are not having “high speed” broadband, here is the link to what Modi said.
We need something like this. From this report:
If the technology proves successful, subscribers with small dishes will connect to the Internet at speeds many times faster than what is now available over residential cable or DSL services.
The Associated Press said the satellite would offer speeds of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second.
This is the kind of commitment that Government needs to put in. Manmoron and his team are clear laggards as far as implementation is concerned. Assholes.
