Month: February 2012

In India, politics has been reduced to a focus on the trivial. . The UP elections seem to focus on caste, quotas and freebies. It is a race to the bottom. At least that is what it seems from the outside. Populism, more than progressive policies, rules. Maybe it will take another election for different agendas to come to the fore.

2014 will be a crucial election for India’s future. There will be a change of guard in both the leading national political parties. There will be many regional  parties all hoping to get enough seats to have disproportionate clout in a new government.

This is where history can help. Understanding our past elections can perhaps help decode the reasons for victory and defeat, and see how one can be turned into the other.  India’s chequered political past offers a fascinating array of case studies and clues to help plan for the future.

Continued tomorrow.

My motivation in reading about the past has been to see if there is a way we in India can make a better political choice in 2014, when the next elections are due (unless of course, we have a mid-term poll). Will the Congress be back for one more term? Will the BJP manage to break the Congress run? Will there be a surprise?

All of these questions matter if we want to see India on a track of development and good governance. What we have right now is a country on auto-pilot. There are aspirations of a generation of people who want to do so much. The world needs places that can grow fast so they can invest in these economies. And there are those who would like to see an India get its due place in the global ecosystem.

None of this is going to happen by default or accident. There has to be some design to it. While change could happen outside the political system also, the power of good leaders to orchestrate a better future is unparalleled. And as we have seen in our past, leaders can also create bad policies which can prevent  growth and development.

Continued tomorrow.

Over the past month or so, I have begun to read India’s post-Independence history. The objective was to get a better understanding of India’s political past, so one can think about the future. The idea was to understand the evolution of the various political leaders, dig deeper into the events that have shaped the policies through our past 60 years, and fathom why we made a number of wrong turns since Independence.

My approach has been to focus on key events through these 60 years, and read them through the words of multiple authors. Writers have their biases, and to interpret what has happened, I figured it would be a good idea to read a wide  range of analyses so I could then create my own mental models and maps of what happened.

It has been a fascinating journey so far. And as I read, so many “What-Ifs” come up. India has been singularly unfortunate that at many times, when we could chosen development and prosperity, events occurred which pushed us in a different direction.

Continued tomorrow.

History was never a subject I particularly liked when in school. Maybe, it was because all it involved was memorisation of lots of dates and events, and other random stuff. History just seemed so static – we were studying our own country, but in a sort of distant way. And then there was  world history with even more dates and events. The only skill involved in the study of history  was how well one could reproduce the printed text book.

India’s history is rich and tapestried. It is long and has a fascinating array of people and stories.  Unfortunately, that breadth and depth was missing in the way the text books were written and the subject was taught. The saving grace was   Amar Chitra Katha comics.  Published twice a month, they were something I looked forward to. It brought history  alive in a manner in which history textbooks never did.

And so it has been  for the better part of my life. The present and future seemed of greater interest than the past. That is starting to change.

Continued tomorrow.

From a post a year ago:

This week’s links:

• The coming tech-led boom: from WSJ. “In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.”
• Top Tech Trends: from IEEE Spectrum. “Prediction of the tech that will make news this year.”
• The e-commerce revolution is all about you: from Techcrunch. “With the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers’ fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal.”
• 2009 India Election Analysis: I came across this a few days ago. Very interesting points highlighted by Christopher Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers. “Evidence from the results themselves show that…the process of fragmentation of the party system and the electorate is still progressing, Indian voters having opted for regional and local players more than they ever did before.”
• Unravelling India: An op-ed (Part 1) in the Business Standard on India’s economic scenario. ” How badly will this political paralysis hurt the economy’s immediate prospects? What’s the best way of tackling the endemic corruption? And is India’s long-term growth story still intact?”

One point to note about India is the huge base of feature phones. These are not the smartphone variety with Android, iOS or Blackberry’s operating systems and app stores.  It will take some time before the smartphones reach critical mass. So, in the near-term, the opportunity is not as much on apps but on delivering services to feature phones via mobile operator billing.

The combination of open publishing platforms and operator-enabled micro-billing can transform the MVAS space in India by creating entrepreneurs everywhere – just like Apple’s AppStore did globally. This is what will drive the local content industry and create services relevant in our daily lives.

There is an exciting new world ahead of us. India’s mobile data revolution has largely bypassed the local industry. With some big thinking from the operators and RBI to simplify the mobile micro-payments, we could see a huge flourish of ideas and innovation. Will 2012 see this happen?

For the next-generation of MVAS to flourish in India, it is important to add a capability of micro-billing of consumers. This removes the dependency on advertising as the only source of revenue for content and service creators. As we have seen from the first generation of MVAS, users have no problems in paying anywhere from Rs 3 for an sms to a shortcode to Rs 30 per month for various services.

Since RBI has put very onerous conditions and not differentiated small payments from large, the banking and mobile wallets route looks unlikely to gain wide transaction in the near future. That leaves the operator route. Operators should  come up with a revenue share where the majority of what the user pays goes to the content and service providers, and payments should be made every month. This will create the necessary incentive for an entire industry of entrepreneurs to kickstart the Indian i-mode revolution.

The market is large. There are 100+ million mobile users in India who could easily pay Rs 50-100 each month for a wide range of data services. This is a market worth Rs 6,000-12,000 crore ($1.2-2.4 billion) annually. Operators would tend to make their money from increased data usage and the transaction fees, while the content and service providers would now also be able to get larger shares.

Continued tomorrow.

What will this new generation of MVAS look like? What can enable this world faster?

To answer these questions, it is instructive to look at what happened in Japan’s mobile space in 1999. That was when NTT Docomo, the largest mobile operator, launched i-mode. It did three things: opened up its platform to all software or content entities from a service creation point of view, standaridsed the pricing of each service to 300 yen a month, and shared 91% of this revenue with the service provider.

In other words, what NTT Docomo did was keep the data traffic revenue and 9% of the monthly service revenue. IN a few months, the service ecosystem had exploded to tens of thousands and i-mode’s user base grow to millions. It was a win-win for everyone.

If mobile operators in India can get their actions right, India too can see a similar explosion of mobile data innovation in the coming years.

Continued tomorrow.