Posts by Raj

X protests forced suspension of accounts on orders of India's government

Everyone has a right to freedom of expression

Freedom of speech, expression and movement applies to EVERYONE.

These fat, privileged absentee landlords repeatedly threatening the government in order to retain their privileged benefits, are a nuisance.

They speak for no one but themselves.

If they want to protest, fine. Get a damn permit. Book and pay for a park or other public open space for a limited time, and hold your gathering there, requesting the press tand public to come listen to you if they care.

If no one listens to you, that means you failed.

Protesters whose modus operandi is to modify tractors with barrier desrtunction lances and tear gas protection compartments to ram their way into the national capital ? Blocking a major arterial expressway for weeks ?

I don't care about their 'freedom of speech' one bit. They're a bunch of goons trying to get their way through violence. Throw the entire lot of them in prison and throw away the keys.

India to make its digital currency programmable

Re: CAP theorem

P may be largely in the electronic domain but C and A have plenty of analogous concerns in non digital money, and are subject to manual speeds.

Let's talk scaling here with respect to what's been achieved in the M0 domain to set a baseline: https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics

UPI had its first full year in 2017. It now has annual turnover of:

2023: $2.5 trillion from 120 billion transactions

2022: $1.4 trillion from 75 billion transactions

2021: $880 billion from 40 billion transactions

2020: $420 billion from 19 billion transactions

2019: $220 billion from !0 billion transactions

That's a near doubling YoY that's been going on several years now. Mainly driven by the ~750 million smartphone users in India.

UPI already accounts for a substantial share of RBI M0 data, and turnover will exceed the dollar GDP ($4 trillion) in perhaps 2-3 years. Of course that's normal of M0 but it's a measure of scale of digital payments.

Indian and Chinese central banks deal with mature systems operating at volume and value scale not seen anywhere else on the planet. They already have experience dealing with TD atomicity and instantaniety . Bank issued stablecoin is an incremental problem for them, and they've a prior record of building and scaling pilot designs.

Re: Maybe try walking before running?

A sieve ? Is that a unit of measurement ? How much are you talking ? 10% ? 20% ?

The listed article is about a get rich quick scheme depending on social engineering people into using fake apps to disclose their personal data. It states that an enormous $44,000 was bilked. Over two months involving 30,000 victims, i.e an average of under $1.50 - about the cost of a meal from a push cart, not even a sit down restaurant.

The official UPI data is at https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics.

UPI does about $2,500,000,000,000 - 2.5 trillion dollars - in annual turnover. Up from 1,4 trillion a year ago. Over two months, it now averages about $450 billion, or $450,000,000,000 .

The listed crime is 0.00001% of the UPI turnover during that period. If I had a sieve like that, I'd consider getting another.

India inches space program forward with launch of X-ray polarimetry satellite

Re: Well done but who paid for it?

Is 2.3 billion supposed to sound impressive somehow ?

India holds a HUNDRED times that - 230 billion dollars of US treasuries - https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

And another 60-70 billion of BoE debt, part of the worlds 4th largest foreign exchange reserves behind China, Japan and Switzerland : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-exchange_reserves

In other words, the US and UK have current outstanding liabilities to India far exceeding all combined aid they’ve ever sent it .

This ‘aid to India’ trope has been faithfully indoctrinated to two generations of online Brits now, who remain unaware how much the world has changed in that time.

Scammers use India’s real-time payment system to siphon off money, send it to China

Why are you characterizing a social engineering crime as a technical vulnerability off the UPI platform ? You realize this entire scam can be transacted face to face as well ? It’s how old people are commonly duped around the world.

India lands Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on Moon, is the first to lunar south pole

Re: Tell me again

We all love reading a good British whine about India, but maybe you could try making a little more sense.

Do you normally carry a commode around in a backpack with you everywhere alongside your phone sofas to maintain a 1:1 ratio ?

Yes India has something like 800 million smartphones as of 2023 - effectively every adult having one as you’ve seen from all your hotel walks. You’ll also notice that none of them were also lugging a loo with them.

Don’t blame countries for your own inability to choose foods that don’t give you the runs at the wrong moments.

A wonderful achievement for India - the entire nation came to a standstill during the lander descent, and the youtube live feed was the most watched in the history of that platform. These things are a big deal in the grander scheme of things around nation building.

Chandrayaan 3 benefited from the terrain mapping by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, that continues to troop on around the moon despite the loss of its lander 4 years ago. That detailed terrain mapping data is valuable to ISRO for future endeavors, in addition to enabling them to easily nail the Chandrayaan 3 landing.

One thing I wish would change faster is the use of frugal engineering. It's fine that the mission cost only $80 million whatever. But science and technology research should get quite a bit more money. ISRO in particular needs resources to build far more powerful launchers than the LVM3 which currently tops out at 10 tonnes to LEO / 4 tonnes to GTO.

Out of nowhere, India requires PC and server makers to get an import license

Bulk of India can’t afford smartphones ?

Simon has clearly not been to India lately. Or looked at the data for that matter.

India is a very young country. About 60% of population in the 18-60 prime working age group. That’s about 800 million people. As of 2022, there are 660 million smartphone users in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration

But never mind data, just go to India. Smartphones are central to the UPI digital payment system. In any big or small city pretty much every adult around you has one. You scan and pay for almost everything using UPI. Vegetables from the roadside vendor cart, the donation box at the temple, the autorickshaw, petrol stands. You can survive without cash around large parts of India outside the really rural parts with just a smartphone and UPI. There are blogs out there of bikers riding from the north to south talking about just needing their phone all the while.

Anyone who claims the bulk of India can’t afford or use smartphones clearly hasn’t been there recently. In the past 12 months smartphones have been used in India to transact an aggregate 90 billion transactions amounting to $2 trillion -in value - at actual current exchange rate, not some purchasing power basis.

The Register seems largely blind to the fintech revolution going on in India.

Now Foxconn hopes to lure TSMC, Japan’s TMH into India chip fab pact – report

Re: Expansion

Good thing they don’t listen to someone like you.

India takes second punt at soft lunar landing with launch of Chandrayaan-3 mission

Re: All well and good..... @Raj

You seem to be very invested in the idea that an Indian would consider money coming to India from UK - an entity that previously plundered the country - as 'aid'.

As far as we're concerned, what's been happening is perfect - anytime we go anything worthwhile, Brits get up in arms imagining it was all done with 'their money', berate us, berate their leaders, and - as they've done the past many years - keep sending what they call aid.

It's like being paid to attend an excellent comedy show. As in a comedy show, I don't have to offer you an opinion - I can laugh and clap and walk away with more money - sorry, 'aid' - in the pocket.

Re: All well and good.....

India holds around $600 billion in foreign exchange reserves - the worlds 4th biggest behind China, Japan and Switzerland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-exchange_reserves

About a sixth of that is in GBP, meaning today the UK is indebted to India to the tune of a sum exceeding all ‘aid’ ever cumulatively sent to India from London since 1947.

I’ve been seeing this hilarious ‘is THAT what they’re doing with the money we send them ? This is outrageous!’ pearl clutching since about the mid 90s when India first got internet, meaning that was probably your parents. I bet your kids gonna keep at it about 25 years from now, and in India we’d be enjoying the sight of 3 generations of the same joke repeating itself every time a rocket goes up.

The Chandrayaan 2 didn’t entirely fail . It had a large orbiter and a comparatively smaller lander and rover. The last two did fail but the orbiter has a 7 year design life and continues to operate to the present day.

Chandrayaan 3 - the current mission - does NOT have an orbiter. It reuses the Chandrayaan 2 one, and takes advantage of the additional payload capacity to send a larger lander and rover.

Chandrayaan 2+3 gives India a substantial orbiter , lander and rover combo it would otherwise not have been able to send in one mission, until it has the next generation heavy launchers in operation.

LVM3 now has a flawless 7/7 launch record, with its payload due to scale up significantly once the Vikas engines are replaced by the SCE200 kerolox ones.

Indian telecoms leaps from 2G, to 4G, to 6G – on a single day

5G and 6G are not about user level technologies. They’re about standards and IP ownership. Neither India nor China will sign up for telecom standards whose IP is foreign owned.

They’re going to craft their own because each of them has over a billion cell subscribers and well over half a billion smartphone users, and can’t be paying others royalty for that much of a market.

India took time with ensuring 5GI was ratified, it wants to avoid such delays with its own country specific 6G. It has nothing to do with how pertinent 6G is as a user facing platform, it’s all about control over IP and the hundreds of billions in tech equipment around it,

India's space agency set to launch lunar lander, rover

Re: Cheap

They’re a government organization with a budget and audits. You can find the boring numbers on isro.gov.in .

India's major IT outsourcers slow hiring and fret about deal pipelines

Re: Hopefully a reversal

Why ? Let the East India Company mechanism work he other way around for a while. It’s only fair.

OneWeb lofts last batch of satellites to enable global internet service

Good to see ISRO's LVM3 chalk up yet another perfect launch. Two OneWeb payloads from SDSC in the past six months, lofting up a total of 72 OneWeb satellites.

Since the Russian fiasco, OneWeb has done well splitting its orders between ISRO and SpaceX, with LVM3 and Falcon9 lofting all its satellites cleanly so far.

Next LVM3 mission is Chandrayaan-3 - the Indian lunar lander and rover effort.

India gives itself a mission to lead the 'Global South' into 6G era

Meanwhile the UK is doing a far better job of being an authoritarian state with draconian laws:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-facebook-and-twitter-posts-soar-in-london-a7064246.html

Arrests for offensive Facebook and Twitter posts soar in London

https://www.theregister.com/2016/06/02/social_media_arrests_up_37pc_london_section_127_communications_act/

Arrests for 'offensive' Twitter and Facebook messages up by a third

So Brits, if you replace Modi with Sunak in your lovely witticisms, do you still end up in jail for it ?

Glass houses. Stones.

People still use 'first world' and 'third world' when that's just a classification of countries from the cold war and vent out of use in 1991.

Indian state turns off internet for 27 million, for four days, to stymie one man

Britain is not in a position to dictate anything.

What India is doing to quell any terrorism is effectively a carbon copy of British policy in Northern Ireland. Terrorists WILL be stamped out with the full might of the state.

The citizens by and large support this policy. Do a referendum in India and you’ll find overwhelming support for this policy. That is the only thing that matters here,

US government sets a 30-day deadline for wiping TikTok from feds' phones

Re: From *Government* devices

Nope, not in India. TikTok and about 60 other Chinese apps are banned nationwide, from all 600 million+ smartphone users. India used to be TikToks biggest market with over 200 million users, and it’s now 0.

It’s he right move. The west just lacks the political will to do the same thing.

India uses emergency powers to order takedown of BBC documentary

Re: Russian media in UK

Oh thanks for that advice on how to finesse it. Like "he wasn't fired, he was involuntarily encouraged to solicit alternative employment avenues."

Got it.

I'm sure the Indian government can be suitably informed so that the Beeb will just 'lose its license to broadcast' in India, next time. It's the BBC - there'll always be a next time.

Russian media in UK

Is this the same BBC that is a primary state sponsored broadcasting company in the UK, which banned RT UK from broadcasting ? Or is this another BBC from another UK that doesn't have multiple fingers pointing back at itself while pointing one finger elsewhere ?

Britain bans Russian state TV channel RT

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/18/media/uk-bans-russia-rt-tv/index.html

You say you have your detailed reasoning for banning RT while having your own detailed reasoning for why you think BBC is being treated badly by India ? Guess what - everyone can play that logic parlour game. There's nothing that makes you fundamentally better.

As far as India is concerned, the BBC documentary meant for a domestic audience targeting at Rishi Sunak, not Modi. We in India already know that BBC and any part of the UK press that's Labour friendly cannot stand the guy.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: Easing of Visa requirements for Indian travellers?

Why's that a problem ? The UK SVV is GBP788 for a 5 year one.

https://visa-fees.homeoffice.gov.uk/y/usa/usd/visit/all

The Indian business visa for up to 5 years is merely GBP519.

https://visa.vfsglobal.com/one-pager/india/uk/visa-services/english/pdf/Visa_Fees_List.pdf

You got a bargain.

Meta mad as hell over allegations it let Indian politicians block content

Lol

The whole thing is a laugh riot . The Liar taking on Meta in a contest to see who’s the more honest one.

On one side you have Sid V frantically making and hen deleting Twitter posts when he realizes he’s legally liable for the claims he makes, and on the other hand you have Meta being Meta.

Blue on blue is great to enjoy over popcorn.

UK, US slip down World Digital Competitiveness Ranking

Confidential methodologies = irony

So the rankings celebrate open collaborative access to digital technology, but the whole article, all raw data and statistical constructs are confidential or mostly paywalled ?

This is the bane of the present - a whole bunch of rankings that we are all supposed to swallow without question. Sorry, I don’t personally care about what a ranking is. I do care to understand how it is constructed. The model is of far more interest than anything it spits out.

A lot of these rankings are simply science-crafting . They aren’t worth it unless the creators put the entire database and methodology public, enable reproducibility and are able to defend their coefficients.

India seeks verified IDs to register email accounts

> The identity of the sender of any message must be made available to the recipient – a measure designed to reduce spam.

That's Simon making things up as usual. The draft of the law is terse and just ensures the government has the ability to track down spammers because services have to record sender information and make it available to the government.

India lets Mastercard issue new cards again

Re: India is the new China

"Nationalist" ? Why would I as an Indian be subject to US law when it comes to a problem with my local credit card, that I may not even be able to use in the US ? I'm not interested in my data being on an American server. It should be in India, within control of India law, not a pawn to some international tiff.

If Visa/MC want to do business in India, they keep that data in India, on Indian data centers, within the purview of Indian law. This framework of laws will ultimately apply to every internet provider, from payment intermediaries to SM companies.

There's nothing nationalist in this. It's where the money is - data is the new gold. Data on the economic behavior of 1 billion people.

Twitter sues Indian government over content takedown orders

Re: Need to replace platforms

"Democracy" ? "Freedom of speech" ? You're off your rocker here. Twitter's actual problem in India is nothing so idealistic. They're run by a group of unaccountable hard left types who are pissing off everyone to the right of them - from the center-left to the right.

Twitter India's problem is that it's cavalierly giving and taking away 'verified' tags, shadow-banning significant personalities on and off, and generally giving influential online personalities no reason to be their ally in any fight with the authorities.

Getting lost in hoary and high minded ideals is impressive, but Twitter India's going down for far more mundane reasons.

India: It would be fab if Intel and TSMC built plants here

Anglophere is not the world

Always funny to read Brits , from a country that pillaged and looted India, runs around wagging fingers in peoples faces about what India should or should not do about some country invading another.

The best response here is the one where the person stated that Ukraine is a European regional conflict. That's what it is to Asia. The Russo-Ukraine conflict is two sets of Europeans killing each other. Western Europe and Russia have been at each others throats for generations now. Doesn't matter who's in Russia - Stalin, Putin, Nextguyin.

This is a European ethnic conflict whose details fundamentally only matter to Europe. On one side you have western Europe composed of a bunch of colonial countries who are just 2 generations removed from plundering the world, a few who were busy doing atrocious things in war, and another set of countries who were busy doing more atrocious things to their own people and their enemies.

To India and the rest of Asia, all the gory details from either side of the war are as interesting as the minute historical details of some Asian conflict region are to a European. It's a shame, but it's been going on forever, shrug.

This is literally true for Europe. It's period of peace in the late 20th century is fundamentally an aberration. Your ancestors have been killing each other endlessly for 1000+ years. Now it's just started all over again - the Anglosphere blaming the German world blaming the Russians blaming the... wheels within wheels.

You want our support ? Come back with a list of all our conflicts where you sanctioned the other guy and tripped over your shoelaces in your haste to support India. Let's see if you're worth actually supporting eh ?

India's role in Ukraine was to get its people out. It has the global power to get Ukraine and Russia to stop fighting long enough to fly ferry flights to evacuate its own, Turks, even Pakistanis out of the war zone. That's literally all our skin in this fight is. Same as what UK or US would do in an Asian war - all that matters to you is getting your people out, then let the locals figure out on their own how to stop fighting.

Europeans have been killing each other for spectacularly long. 30 years war. 100 years war. World Wars. Europe is great at doing this at scale.

Re: Twists in time

You're getting literally nothing right. There's no 'US blacklist'. Modi is not and has never been President - not even of his own party, much less the country. And there's no 'Ghandi'. No one in India knows who Roger Stone is. You'd be hardpressed to find anyone who recalls who Nixon was. It was literally 50+ years ago. India is YOUNG - more than half the population is younger than 35.

HCL and HP named in unflattering audit of India’s biometric ID system

0.3 percent

There are close to 1.4 billion Aadhaar cards in use. Every resident of India gets one - even non citizens. The quoted figure is just over quarter of a percent.

They underpin every major public benefit in India - direct benefits transfer (personal subsidies and income supplementation), the national health program and even CoWin, the Covid vaccination registration system. India has performed almost 1.9 billion vaccinations, a billion of them unique individuals, all registered using Aadhaar.

DBT alone has cut $30 billion of prior graft - several times the cost of UIDAI .

https://www.financialexpress.com/economy/dbt-savings-rs-2-23l-cr-counting/2378657/

https://dashboard.CoWin.gov.in

The CAG is only ever going to write unflattering reports. That’s their statutory role - they’re supposed to find problems and ask the hard questions, and to do it loudly and openly.

This is a system that’s actually working - the largest or second largest digital ID system on the planet by a long distance, 2x the size of anything Europe combined would run, over a subcontinental sized country with a fraction of Europe’s per capita income.

What’s the problem here exactly ?

India surpasses a billion active mobile subscriptions

5Gi

Poorly researched article that doesn't explain much .

TRAI reports two numbers: total subscribers, total active subscribers. There's a separate data set that reports total unique subscribers, which is approx 800 million the last I checked, i.e. that many people have at least one cellphone. TRAI updates the active subscriber data periodically, so that the total count drops every few months, e.g. Nov vs Dec data.

Now onto smartphones - the market is 'far from saturated with them'. Ok how many ? Why quote PC numbers here ? Off Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphone_penetration

India has 500 million smartphones. Why not mention it - '500 million' and 'far from saturated' sounds a little ironic ?

India has 1.35 billion people. 'Millions of Indians' means little. That many... just burped. But there are numbers that are still a lot, and 500 million is one of those.

Look at the coverage map: https://www.nperf.com/en/map/IN/-/-/signal/?ll=22.12215821805932&lg=82.785&zoom=4 . The three majors are saturated with their LTE coverage. Only the state run BSNL has 2G/3G, partly because its tied to railway connectivity, and the railways wants dedicated 4G spectrum to complete the move.

The 5G story is a LOT more nuanced than the author understands. India does not want to repeat the 4G story in 5G, i.e. it will NOT buy western or Chinese 5G standard gear. India just had the 3GPP merge the domestic 5Gi standard.

This is the future of xG telephony - India and China with their sheer market sizes will have their own standard and there's not going to be outbound licensing revenue streams here. The money and technology stay at home.

It's simply a matter of time before 5Gi phones saturate the market. It's not like people are complaining en masse about LTE data speeds.

Spot the irony: India's Reserve Bank says outsourcing and offshoring are risky

Simon gets pretty excited

... about dry central bank language. They're just doing their jobs here.

Not that Simon reported it, but India did more in IT exports last fiscal than Saudi Arabia made in oil exports.

Sri Lanka to adopt India’s Aadhaar digital identity scheme

Eh ?

> In 2021 Aadhaar was even trialed for real-time identification of Indians as they waited in queues for COVID-19 jabs .

"Trialed" ? It's not in trial mode, it's been in production use since last spring - you can just go over to dashboard.cowin.gov.in and see all the 1.7 billion+ vaccinations registered to Aadhaar IDs plus rich analytics around near-live vaccination counts, daily totals, breakdown by type, age group, vaccine type and more.

It's also how everyone gets their digital certificates - one uses their Aadhaar linked phone and gets the QR code and copy of vaccination record.

Aadhaar isn't just an ID. It's an entire digital ecosystem.

India bans drone imports to help local manufacturers take off

Nothing new here

Shocking expose: Countries shape trade terms to suit their interests! News at 11!

Does your nation's trade policy have anything like 'preferential duty', 'special 301', 'rules of origin', etc, you're doing the same thing. Guess what - US, UK, EU all do.

"Those are permitted by WTO" ? Yeah that's a fundamentalist's view - "it's in The Book, you must believe!" Any document is the creation of the power equation of its time - the ones most strenuously backing it will be those who wish to 'freeze' the power structure at that time.

That's why you'll always see India and other rising powers constantly showing up in WTO complaints lists. It's literally in their interest to attack the existing order continuously and use it to further their own interests.

And the target here is China. If you're so opposed to this, go ahead and speak openly of your support of China - the same China that's busy stealing every tech and IP it can from you. Every rising power will do its darnedest to steal IP and technology. Been the same since long before the industrial age.

The Indian approach here is simple - plan in secrecy, ensure the decks are ready to invest heavily. Announce policy curtailing imports, immediate start to local ecosystem. Over the next 2-5 years China can take it to WTO where the Indian goal is to stall over every possible thing while the market is saturated with domestic production. Pay the token fine and enjoy the benefit of having replaced imports.

Cynical ? Sure, whatever. You're naive if you think this isn't how the game hasn't always been played.

Indian PM says digital rupee will facilitate creation of global digital payment scheme

Re: "will be the digital form of India’s physical currency and will be convertible into cash"

"Cherrypicking" ? Look up at the story title - digital currency in India. Look up a lot less at the bloody comment topic - the use of ATMs in India.

I stated that India does not use cash anywhere as much as it did even a year, much less 5 years ago - over a quarter of all transactions have moved to UPI, which grew from $0 to $1 trillion in annual transactions in 5 years. One can quite easily get around town or the country without ever touching cash or an ATM.

It's all because India build an RTP system and grew it 1000x in just 5 years to the world #1 position. It's everywhere. I can use it for everything from plane tickets to the footwear storage and offering at the local Hindu temple.

It's simply remarkable - a country with a per capita income of $2500 being able to build out and operate a fintech platform of such scale and ubiquity in such a short time that people who may have last been in India 3-4 years ago would never be able to grasp how much has changed.

What's your response instead ?

<Something else> from China does a lot more.

<Something else> from USA does a lot more.

No shit. Go on, wander off yelling at the clouds about USA or China or wherever.

Re: "will be the digital form of India’s physical currency and will be convertible into cash"

Except that Statista has the metric wrong. That's 25 billion transactions in 2020 for a total of $490 billion . Statista gets its data from here:

https://investor.aciworldwide.com/news-releases/news-release-details/global-real-time-payments-transactions-surge-41-percent-2020

"India retains the top spot with 25.5bn real-time payments transactions, followed by China with 15.7bn transactions; South Korea is in 3rd place with 6.0bn, Thailand 4th with 5.2bn and UK is in 5th place with 2.8bn"

$25 billion a year would be quite underwhelming indeed... because India does that much every week, and currently does around Rs.832000 crore ($115 billion) a month across 4.6 billion transactions:

https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics

AliPay is a digital wallet and not an RTP bank-to-bank system, which is why it doesn't even register on any RTP ranking.

Re: "will be the digital form of India’s physical currency and will be convertible into cash"

ATM ? India does $1 trillion in real time electronic payments across 42 billion transactions, by far the largest in the world, having overtaken China in 2018-19. It will cross $2 trillion by end 2022, having at least doubled in each of the past 5 years.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/25871.jpeg

You can use real time payments on online stores, big retail outlets, small stores and even pushcart vendors have their QR code pasted on the cart.

Re: Are they going to be anything like the rupee notes?

You haven't been to India lately have you ? India has the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) real-time payments system that currently does 40 billion transactions a year totaling over $1 trillion. The transaction volume of UPI has our doubled for each of the past 5 years, and by end of year will hit $2 trillion.

There are over 750 million smartphones in use out of 1.3 billion total phones. Even pushcart vendors have QR codes for real time payments. You can reasonably get around town and travel around country without ever touching cash.

India already has a functional national ID tied to ones mobile, bank and other data. Almost 450 million bank accounts were opened since 2014, connected to this infrastructure. It's called JAM (Jan Dhan - Aadhaar - Mobile), after the banking, ID and smartphone based mechanism.

The same system also records your Covid vaccination status (CoWin) . One doesn't use paper - the app or the CoWin whatsapp number gets you the copy of your certificate. 1.7 billion Covid vaccinations done so far.

India backs away from digital services tax after US pressure

Re: Title makes no sense

The rest of the world isn’t obligated to understand every aspect of American politics . The US has a presidential system . The President is the face of government . The details of the system are a problem for Americans alone. Others owe Americans any such consideration only if the the reverse is true, which it isn’t.

Biden has an entire career - about 4 decades ? - of being senator from a state essentially known for being a corporate tax dodge. He backs sanctions - him and not his predecessor- on countries preventing big MNCs from doing tax dodges because… ?

US foreign trade policy is messed up enough that it simultaneously arranges an international minimum corporate tax regime and simultaneously applies sanctions on countries trying to ensure corporations don’t dodge local tax regimes.

The article is misleading because nothing has changed - India continues to impose the levy AND got a minimum tax regime it is happily part of, while the US has yet another mark against itself - sanctioning countries for doing the right thing… again.

The only thing that matters to outsiders is that the US and its President are wrong. The details of why and who’s to blame are just for American consumption.

Title makes no sense

The article contradicts the title . E-tailers resort to an elaborate tax dodge. India responds with a special levy to compensate for it. The US /sanctions/ India for acting against a tax dodge. A G20 deal agrees on a common minimum tax rate. The US removes its sanction but India keeps the levy in exchange for a future promise. Sure, because taxes are always temporary ?

Why on earth is the US going after countries that are doing the right thing here ? Perhaps because Joe Biden was a longtime senator from Delaware - a state that basically exists to serve creative corporate tax dodges ?

India to ban private cryptocurrency, create official version instead

The right move

India is already the world leader in digital payments through its centrally run Unified Payments Interface . Its half a billion smartphone users aggregated 35 billion real time payments totaling over $850 billion in the 12 months to October. That month alone saw 4.2 billion transactions for $105 billion total value: https://www.npci.org.in/what-we-do/upi/product-statistics

These numbers are double the aggregate to the same month in 2020, which in turn was double that of 2019. By end of year these should be 40 billion transactions for $1 trillion in value. With the network effect taking hold, 2022 could see 100 billion transactions for $2 trillion value.

Crypto and for that matter the conventional Visa/MC network have little value in India. The local RuPay card has over 600 million cardholder, an order of magnitude more than Visa. The Indian fintech play is simple - a national tech stack that drives trillions of dollars in internal transactions with strict data localization laws blocking out data collection and cross border personal data movement by ad companies like Google.

What’s crypto going to do here ? India already has a functional and ubiquitous digital payments system. Payment QR codes are everywhere. Even pushcart vendors use it. One can travel across country and conduct all typical transactions using UPI and never deal with cash.

Indias banning crypto not because it’s reactionary but because it already has a robust digital payments infrastructure and crypto is just speculative noise.

Indian PM calls on the world to save youth from Bitcoin

Re: I'm sure Mr Modi only has the welfare of young people on his mind.

Ah yes, the personal attacks didn't take much for you did it ?

Orwellian ? Formalizing and developing an economy is "Orwellian" ?

The country today transacts 1/3rd of its GDP in real time transactions, and almost a quarter of the M1 money comes from it.

Entire realms of corruption - political funding, under the table cash real estate deals, have all been decimated. The poor have a way around cash bribery.

Oh and demonetization was 2 years before Modi was re-elected by the largest mandate in a generation.

But yeah, call me names. Gives you a rise doesn't it ? I don't care what you think of me. You're not that important.

Re: "Modi lauded India's technology sector for helping to address the Y2K problem"

It's Simon. Guys got a long history with India here. You can say a lot of things out of context when you don't actually literally quote the person without embellishing what was said to suit yourself.

The Y2K effort was the first major IT effort that drove the development of the Indian IT scene. Look, on here I know Brits love to uniformly dump on anything to do with Indian IT, but here's some history and data:

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/TX.VAL.SERV.CD.WT/rankings

India finished its prior fiscal year with services exports of $240 billion. This was $14 billion back in 1999.

That year, the head of NASSCOM, the legendary Dewang Mehta, said that one year India would make more in IT exports than Saudi Arabia makes from oil.

That year was the prior fiscal - 2020-21.

If you want to mangle an assertion of pride from the leader of the country towards an industry that's grown to those proportions from those humble beginnings, go right ahead. It speaks all about who you are, than anything to do with Indian IT.

Re: I'm sure Mr Modi only has the welfare of young people on his mind.

A little late to the news aren't you ? Crypto - especially days since COP26 - is a waste of energy expressing itself as a speculative mania. Why not go back on google and search 'tulip mania' while you're dredging up history ?

Four years on, this is the result of demonetization:

https://sbi.co.in/documents/13958/10990811/281021-Ecowrap_20211029.pdf/b0625dda-46bf-1f1e-2998-3c58c94dd156?t=1635409920832

- Share of informal economy shrunk to <20% from 52% in FY18, when demonetization happened.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/upi-registers-record-4-21-bn-transactions-worth-rs-7-71-trn-in-october-121110100572_1.html

- UPI, the Indian real time payments interface, records 4.2 billion transactions worth over $100 billion in October.

Here's what The Register is completely blind to - in the past four years, the trailing 12 month total in UPI transactions was:

Oct 2021: $852B

Oct 2020: $397B

Oct 2019: $218B

Oct 2018: $56B

Oct 2017: $5B

https://twitter.com/surajbrf/status/1455295485518893058

Around January, the trailing 12 month figure in RT payments will cross $1 trillion, on the back of a transaction volume of around 40 billion then.

India is by a long distance the world's biggest RT payments market, with 35 billion transactions in the 12 months to Oct 21. Second place is China with ~20 billion.

It's true, the total value is pretty small - 'just' $1 trillion from 40 billion transactions. Just ~$25 per transaction, because it's not just a few high value transactions. It's everyone and their dog using UPI .

Visa and Mastercard have essentially been decimated - the local RuPay card has 650 million subscribers, about 10x the western ones. What's more, the entire infrastructure is in India, with Indian data localization law forbidding Indian transaction data from being hosted outside.

Demonetization is simply a step that occured in lock step with UPI at literally the same time. QR codes are ubiquitous - even push cart sellers prefer it. Why ? Have you seen the state of small cash ? They're dirty, torn and hard to exchange with banks.

With UPI, everything happens mobile to mobile. There are 1.3 billion mobile connections in India, approx 800 million unique users, out of a population of 930 million adults. Smartphones number approx 550 million now.

But yeah tell us what you know about all this, because you're such a pro at digging up old news with no idea what's happening in the world today.

Indian government promises One Portal To Rule Them all in support of colossal infrastructure build

Context matters

This article wastes time contextualizing this IT plan against the experience in the west. It would do better to compare against what has been built in India in the past 7 years.

Ever heard of something called Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) infrastructure ? Almost every Indian adult resident has a unique ID (Aadhaar) now, 450 million new bank accounts to rural adults since 2014, 600 million debit cards called RuPay and currently ~800 million smartphone holders. There are ~925m adults in India.

Upon this, the UPI digital payments infrastructure has been built. It did 36 billion transactions in the past year, and will total ~$1.25 trillion in transactions this year. Second placed China did 18 billion transactions. UPI volume has doubled each year the past 4 years, and today accounts for 20% of M1 data and will likely overtake cash transactions in under 2 years. Pushcart vendors offer QR codes for epay.

The same infrastructure also hosts the CoWin vaccination registration and reporting platform. At the onset of Covid, the government transferred $25 billion directly into the accounts of those below poverty line. No middlemen.

Several states no longer issue paper certificates (birth, death, marriage, vaccination) but QR-based digital records. There's no interaction with anyone to bribe.

Numerous departments now have dashboards tracking progress. CoWin, rural electrification, the national piped water connection program, and more. Connecting departments together to manage coordinated activity is simply further integration of an already vast platform.

You talk about some siloed IT platform being trouble to upgrade. You missed the news about the entire transactional economy and interface to government being replaced with a far more pervasive digital interface these past 7 years.

India makes a play to source rare earths – systematic scrapping of its old cars

Re: They need to learn from "cash for clunkers" in the US

The UK was in Afghanistan for almost 15 of those years too. Don't dump it all on the US.

What the fcuk is wrong with you ? You think your Hinduphobic bigotry is a joke ? A coward's exactly what you are.

India's return to space fails after first locally built cryogenic engine experiences 'anomaly'

Ah absolute dollar GDP per capita.

You must be that white guy I saw in Bangalore stridently haranguing the barber saying a haircut cost GBP10 in UK and that's what he was going to pay - in converted rupees. And then went and paid for his chicken curry paying the same price he pays at Nandos - converted to Rupees. And the autorickshaw guy the... yup, you got it.

Absolute dollar GDP per capita is a completely useless construct in India. It just makes you look like you have never heard of purchasing power.

The UK absolute and PPP GDPs are percents apart. Indian ones are like 5-10x apart depending on whether you're looking at what the World Bank says or what your actual daily expenses are like for an average visitor or resident.

Re: Waste of whose money?

As of last week, India's foreign exchange reserves were, hmm $620 billion . 4th largest behind China, Japan and Switzerland, a long way ahead of UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-exchange_reserves

About $220 billion of that is US treasuries. Probably $50-75 billion in BoE treasuries last I checked. In other words, India currently loans the UK more money than all the aid ever sent since independence.

I first got on the internet in the late 90s in school. The British press used to talk about 'aid to India' then. Still faithfully uses it as a rhetorical construct.

How about the British aid to China though ? They desperately need money to graduate from bicycles. Read all about it in the Daily Mail.