1) Every country's reserve bank has some regulations & the corporations are supposed to follow them. This is done to save the local banking services & local industries. You are looking at this from a user point of view or a Techie. However, if you ask a banker about this issue he will tell you from his point of view as why the policy of Paypal doesn't fit our needs.
Look at the problem from both sides, not just from a Techie's point of view.
2) Every company which wants to sale its product in India, has to register itself as a retail company & pay sales tax & other taxes accordingly. Without this, any company can come & sale there product in India soil without paying any tax to Government. Its not a wrong law, its there to save the local industries. MS doesn't sale there own product in campus or directly but they sale through distributer who pay tax to government.
3) Every telecommunication decision is made after taking into account many other factors. Rolling out 3G isn't that easy as it takes installation of completely new infrastructure while India is still very efficiently using the old 2.5G compliant hardware backend. You will be amazed to know how much work BSNL is able to take out from old machines at minuscule cost for today's industry. Besides, until Indian Army was able to jump to 4G, 3G wasn't rolled out as defense department is always one step ahead of consumers in terms of technology.
4) If India has unlimited broadband, then India also has leechers who download day & night & increase piracy. FUP is wrong, but limit is good. I am myself using Tata Indicom with 100GB monthly bandwidth & despite of heavy downloading which also includes piracy, I am not able to deplete it.
Ask yourself, do you really need more then say 40 GB monthly bandwidth if you are not pirating and downloading illegal movies , music or games.
Unlimited is just a vogue term. It has no meaning today. Even with unlimited usage you won't download a lot.
5) Politicians are not as unaware of technology & things out there as we think they are. They got highly educated people working for them who are the ones actually running India.
Decisions have to be made keeping in mind that India is a democracy & in democracy you have to find a way to make everyone happy.
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.
