Posts by DoingMyHeadIn 4 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2011
Totally agree with @implicateorder
It takes a lot less infrastructure investment to provide subsidised mobiles, associated infrastructure and call charges than a sea of copper landlines. It is clever strategy seen all over Asia, but obviously not in Europe/US where that investment decision was made pre-IT and now needs to be maintained.
Internet provision is seen in India as a luxury item (whether by copper broadband or 3G) and so is costed and taxed appropriately. On the other hand mobile call charges are priced ridiculously low in comparison to the West.
But going back to the provision of loos, the vast majority of toilets are not connected to mains sewerage even in quite prosperous households, at least outside of cities. modern (bio) septic tanks are the order of the day and 'grey water' treatment stategies are increasingly common. This has the much needed benefit of tackling water shortages.
India is a really complex society - it demeans Westerners to make facile and 'easy' statements as if they understand India.
There does seem to be an assumption throughout this (if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me - I know you will!) that all orphaned books have unknown American owners and therefore this whole scheme should benefit the 'us population').
Last time I looked, English language books were being written by Indians, Australians, New Zealanders and (racking my brains here) the British themselves - sorry if I've left anybody out!
And what about books written in Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French etc - are there not orphaned works in any language other than American?
Surely any settlement Google makes should benefit the world?
More than a handful of my mates in India have pointed out this interesting conundrum: just about every Indian businessman, politician and 'anyone of influence' uses an encrypted Blackberry service.
So if RIM are indeed punished by having their services taken down, it is exactly those same enforcers that will cut off their own noses.
They may be wrong, but all the connected Indians I've spoken to think their Government is bluffing and that RIM have nothing major to fear.
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