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IT progress in India is still stifled by people in power

I’m one of the several million frustrated Indian citizens, angry at the government for their lack of effort and at the companies who come up with newer ways of providing us with service that only gets worse. There are specific examples that make me believe that the problem has a lot to do with the wrong people at the jobs, either that or they simply lack the willingness to improve things in India.
Written by Manan Kakkar, Contributor

I’m one of the several million frustrated Indian citizens, angry at the government for their lack of effort and at the companies who come up with newer ways of providing us with service that only gets worse. There are specific examples that make me believe that the problem has a lot to do with the wrong people at the jobs, either that or they simply lack the willingness to improve things in India. Here are four instances whichare amusing as to why haven't the people in a position to better things done so:

1. RBI vs PayPal

For someone who spends quite a bit of my time on the Internet, PayPal as a service is very helpful. PayPal is a simple Internet service that allows you transfer money, all you need to have is a Credit Card associated with your account. There are many users like me who’ve closely watched the RBI vs PayPal issue over the past months. For some reason RBI won’t let PayPal function normally, they seem to have some regulatory issues with it.

For a country where ecommerce and micro financing is being seen as a way to make lives of people easier, RBI’s rules and regulations seem to be more of a curse.

2. You can’t buy software on Microsoft campus

So I visited one of Microsoft’s biggest campuses – MSIDC at Hyderabad. Hopeful that I’ll be able to purchase a few copies of software at a discounted rate I was excited. My excitement didn’t last long since there is a law that forbids Microsoft from selling their own products on their campus unless they register themselves as a retailer of some sort. This law is so absurd that I haven’t even bothered to look into it. A company like Microsoft investing millions into India and then they can’t directly sell their products.

Note: I’m taking Microsoft as an example since I’m aware of them being under the restriction.

3. Mobile Number Portability, 3G and 4G

After months of wait India finally saw a successful bidding process for 3G. First it’s quite sad that despite the mobile penetration in India we haven’t got 3G as yet, secondly, Mobile Number Portability is still a distant dream. While this is a more complex issue because no service provider wants to lose customers the government has taken no strong steps to ensure roll out of the service.

4. Broadband

A few months back I had a very interesting chat with blogger friend of mine from across the border. Apparently, broadband in India is worse than that in Pakistan. High prices and laughable speeds with outrageous data limits is what the Indian consumer gets. Despite this, we have managed to make ourselves a name as an IT hub. In this case too, the government has shown no interest to impose on service providers to change their ways. I publish this post via a 512kbps connection that is capped at 20GB bandwidth per month.

I guess, this makes for a good excuse to make to my editor.

Wrong people delegating authority to other wrong people

Either people are lacking the motivation or aren’t sure of how to accelerate progress. Seeing the development in the field government feels the need to regulate several aspects not realizing that the very freedom they are stifling was the reason why Indians were able to excel in this field.

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