India: Its size, its people, its coming of age.
Swati Prasad is a New Delhi-based freelance journalist who spent much of the mid-1990s and 2000s covering brick-and-mortar industries for some of India's leading publications. Seven years back when she took to freelancing, India was at the peak of its "outsourcing hub" glory and the world of Indian IT, telecom and Internet fascinated her. A self-proclaimed technophobic, Swati loves to report on anything that's remotely alien to her--be it cloud computing, telecom, BPOs, social media, e-government or software and hardware, and also how high-tech sectors impact the Indian economy.
All across the globe, governments are embracing technology and e-government projects in the hope that these would bring about efficiencies and reduce corruption. But I am really not sure if this is happening in India.
Earlier this month, there was news of a Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student getting duped of US$6,667 (INR 3,00,000) in an e-mail scam. The fraud started when the student received an e-mail from an organization that called itself the Global Watch Institute, inviting him to attend two seminars it was holding--one in New York and the other in Madrid--on the same subject: Racism and Human Rights.
A (belated) happy new year to all readers of Inside India. 2010 was a peculiar year--it's been termed as the year of scams.
Over the last few months, the Indian media has had a spate of controversies and scams to report on, starting from the Indian Premier League (IPL), to the Commonwealth Games, the Adarsh Society scams and the scandal around allocation of 2G licenses in 2008.Perhaps I'm stating the obvious--corruption thrives on opaqueness.
This is one Google search I wish I hadn't undertaken. This one is actually not a tech blog but about how one Google search shattered a child's dream.
Last month, I disposed of 15 kilogram worth of audio cassette tapes. Yes, I was holding on to them even though I had not played a single tape in the last seven years.
The auctions of 3G and broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum have come as a US$21.6 billion (INR 1000 billion) bonanza for the Indian government.
Finally, the much-delayed 3G auctions will take place in India next month. Nine players will participate in the auctions for pan-India 3G spectrum, which will begin Apr.
Earlier this month, we had our friends over from Bengaluru--Deepty and Namit. Deepty is a tech-savvy corporate lawyer.
It's very difficult to crystal-gaze. Back in 2000, when mobile telephony was becoming cheaper in India (and I had just acquired my first mobile phone--my elder brother's hand-me-down, a Nokia 1610), I would have never anticipated that in less than five years, almost every man/woman on Delhi's streets would own a mobile phone.