Why can’t we learn from mango traders?
By BP Tiwari
Mangos are my favorite summer fruit. I buy most of my mangoes in Mumbai at a nearby local shop. Back in my hometown we buy most of the mangos from local mango market; otherwise it comes from our mango farms. I am on vacations these days and visiting my parents in my hometown. Yesterday , in a cheerful mood my mother said, why don’t you sell those excess mangos to market? I was all excited to experience the selling session of mangos in the local mango market. Fortunately our mangos are of good quality and I was eager to make a good impression of skilled mango seller in front of my parents.
The way mango is sold in my hometown is quite different than here in Mumbai. Here you can sell them at one tenth of the price you will most likely sell in Mumbai. The rationale could be availability of low wage workers, low transportation and maintenance cost cost and mango farms etc. In fact the average monthly income of the people residing in Maihar(the name of my hometown) is 5 to 10 times lower than average monthly income of people in Mumbai. After selling my mangos it came to my mind, why can’t we have different charging mechanism in broadband for different cities based on their paying capabilities and social economic factors? After all you can’t sell Mercedes to everyone.
By evening we sold our mangos and I was talking to my old school acquaintance, a mutual friend of ours asked me, is there a way to take lessons in civil engineering without attending college, since my parents cannot afford expenditure of a formal education? He further explained that to me that in his past he has worked in building state roads, small dams, culverts and duplex houses. I actually consoled him by saying, “Nor Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had formal engineering degrees but they generated more jobs than others”. Nurture your passion with persistence and backed by a burning desire, I am sure nothing in the world will come in your way. However I was eager to show him the free lessons available in the internet by the top professors of the country in the field of civil engineering. The lessons were recorded and brought to the people of country by a new initiative by government of India. (Website: http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd )
The only internet connection available for most of the citizen of country residing in other than top 100 cities is through 2G networks like CDMA 1X or GPRS. My CDMA 1X connection was not capable to show him a working streaming video, however he got the suggestion that internet has many promising possibilities for him. If he can get a working internet connection he might learn continuously and improve himself while taking care of his farms.
I do not see a rationale of charging similar broadband prices which is applicable in metro cities to other parts of country. The cost of spectrum, tower rentals, maintenance and manpower is low as compared to metro cities in rural cities and charging mechanism shall apportions these factors. Everyone is interested in showcasing the grandeur speeds of LTE networks or their new 4G WiMAX RAN. It is true that the first LTE network in Telisonera are capable of supporting over 70 Mbps in 10 MHz channels and over 130 Mbps in 20 MHz channels in Sweden and Norway.
(Note : 1 USD is equal to 7.1 SEK)
For a 30 GB connection the monthly broadband price of US$ 85 in Sweden is less than 3% of their gross domestic product at purchasing power parity per capita. The cost of a 3 GB wireless data connection in rural India is roughly more than 10% of their gross domestic product at purchasing power parity per capita.
I am sure you will recognize that the debate of tiered charging, data offloading and other business models of 4G data is good for intellectual minds, but we need more common sense from the people who has the power to change
the scenario of broadband in country. At least I understood that the mango traders of Mumbai and Maihar know for sure that the charging mechanism of metro and rural India cannot be made same. I expect more common sense from government, operators and broadband policy makers to enable some of my school mates to take civil engineering lessons while taking care of their farms and cattle’s.
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