Posts by Raj 170 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Sep 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Insufficient testing ? But then as usual, the author has a very poor command of the facts.
This isn't a new engine just put to use - it's been in use for a decade now, and is the first failure of the engine in about 9 years.
India used up all the Russian supplied engines by the early 2010s. It has been using CE-7.5 since 2013, and it hasn't had a failure since its first development flight, until now. The Russians haven't been in the picture since Obama's first term.
This is the older GSLV Mk 2. Most of the development rupees are going into developing the LOX/kerosene engine for the Mk 3 .
The writer has no idea what she's talking about. She doesn't know the name of the entity she's talking about. It takes a lot of fluff to convert a dry RBI FSR into a purported "Royal" Bank of India says big tech is out to screw India claim.
She writes about the RTP system in India without mentioning anything - convenient because it would wreck the story if she did.
Summary of the whole article:
* Get the name of the central bank wrong.
* Cherrypick one paragraph within hundreds inside a regular FSR.
* Quote BIS and talk about Amazon, Google etc and not mention what they all run on in India.
* Wave hands around about China doing something else.
How the hell does someone talk about the RBI talking about the real time payments system in India and neither get the name of RBI right nor mention either of the major payments systems, or for that matter who runs them ?
Goes off the rails is putting it mildly.
So to summarize:
1. The Indian government supposedly hacked activists' laptops 2 years BEFORE a riot they knew would occur, and planted the right evidence to incriminate them activists.
2. Arse-anal somehow manages to get all information off computers that have since been wiped clean and reinstalled with Windows, including evidence that's now in federal custody, i.e. everything in the report is actually verifiable reality... somehow.
3. The Indian government is bad because a plot to assassinate a national leader was handled by a central intelligence agency and not by the state government, or ideally not by anyone at all.
4. Somehow a US based entity claiming to have a lot of detailed access to electronic gear associated with political activists in another country is totally ok, but hey if if was US politics and Russian or Chinese or even Indian agencies, that's also totally ok right ?
5. Indian government is also bad because it doesn't let Twitter have the protection of Section 230, a US law. In India. And any other US laws that Twitter things it desires other countries respect. Unless it's not following that law itself.
Cool story bro.
British news is consistent in this regard, and author's been a twat for a long time. I mean, who describes a character as "Doctor <insert name>" ? What's wrong with the universal Dr ? Worried that people wouldn't get the cool joke about how "Simon" doesn't think the man's a "doctor" ? Yeah, maybe you should have also put it in quotes in bold letters with rainbow colors, too.
This is a tech site, but it doesn't mention what CoWin is, or where to find it, because the author can't be depended upon to do his job description. It's here:
https://dashboard.cowin.gov.in/
https://www.cowin.gov.in/
As the dashboard says, there are 340 million odd jabs done to date, and over 350 million have registered on the portal. 120 million vaccinations were done in June, with about 160 million likely in July.
The process for registration is you enter your mobile #, get an OTP, use that to authenticate in and log in with your national ID (Aadhaar). Then you book a spot at one of the local centers and go get your jab. The certificate is uploaded for you automatically, registered against your national ID. You can link it to your passport # too, for travel.
One of the weaknesses of this is lack of push notifications, since the government doesn't want to pass analytics through IIOS/Android ecosystems and wants its own national notification backhaul - a project in development. However, CoWin has opened up the APIs that let developers implement push notifications, and there already exists popular push options for Telegram (and I think Signal). Lots of people used that to get notified.
There's the question of how to do this for those outside the digital divide. India has 1.5 billion registered SIMs in use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. Of these, nearly 800 million are unique users, out of an adult population of 900m (the size of the electorate in the last general election). Over 550 million have smartphones. It's fair to say they have most of the adult population covered - at least near universal coverage of urban areas that are the most likely places for transmission.
You won't get this from Simon though, even though he's supposed to be a "Journalist".
When I was in London I had the same problem. The bellhop explained that he only carries luggage and would not take my laundry to have it cleaned.
Interestingly, engineers, drivers and tea vendors aren't castes.
The imaginary story about the lead Brahmin and the non-Brahmin sidekicks sounds great when shared between two white people but literally makes no sense to an Indian.
I mean, you CAN make up a compelling caste-based stories, but the first test is that it needs to sound credible to a local.
India has 550 million smartphones in use. There are 900 million adults, of whom 130 million are over 60. That's 550/770 million people who can actually use the site. Yes they could do better, and they're fixing it, but it's not all quite evil wicked Brahmins out to screw everyone else.
Not that you'd ever be able to guess but I'm a Dalit.
I first saw this ‘UK aid to India’ meme in the 1990s. Pretty much any time India does something significant, there’s a kerfluffle “how dare they do that with OUR money ?” The consistency of this Pavlovian response is very interesting.
India’s current foreign exchange reserves are around $580-590 billion, after China, Japan, Switzerland and regularly trading the #4 spot with Russia. $225 billion is in US treasuries as their own data shows. About $50 billion in BOE debt.
In other words India currently lends the US and UK more than all the ‘aid’ ever received by India... ever.
This whining is so out of touch with reality, but hey if someone’s going to hand me money and then complain like clockwork that they just handed me money, I’m not going to care.
Autocracy eh ? Let’s see your own home:
https://www.iheartbritishtv.com/british-tv-shows-deemed-offensive-removed-from-streaming-services-updated-june-11/
Fawlty Towers
The Mighty Boosh
The League of Gentlemen
Bo Selecta
Little Britain
They were racist, you say ? Homophobic ? Transphobic ? How terrible indeed. Tsk tsk.
Very well, India determines what constitutes red lines for shows want to air in India and make money out of a vast market. Broadcasters either comply or can leave. The terms are exactly the same as in UK.
When youre done returning from your imaginary parallel universe where you permit “free speech” with absolutely no filters whatsoever, with absolutely no something-phobic as a basis, we’ll talk. Until then your precious pearl clutching about authoritarianism isn’t worth a paisa .
Can’t you read ? The very first line says ‘after a 3 year review process’.
Since you know nothing about the farm bills either:
https://www.orfonline.org/research/intellectual-biography-india-new-farm-laws/
They’re the creation of a 20 year long consultation and experimental process led by none other than the legendary MS Swaminathan .
If you don’t know who that is, seriously just stop talking about Indian agriculture.
tl;dr: a cursory familiarity with the news is a dangerous thing.
British ‘foreign aid’ to India is a joke I’ve been reading for 25 years now. Pretty much every time somethig major happens in India, the British press and commenters respond “oh my goodness is that what THEY are doing with OUR money ??” A very predictable Pavlovian response.
Indian foreign exchange reserves are nearly $600 billion - either the 4th or 5th largest on the planet any given week:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-exchange_reserves
Approximately $220 billion in US treasuries:
https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt
About $50 billion in GBP, ie India currently lends more to UK than all aid ever cumulatively received by India from UK.
Meanwhile British ‘aid’ was $100 million last year, about 0.003% of GDP. Money well spent on outraging yourselves like clockwork every year I guess.
You’re busy beating up your own straw man entirely unrelated to the original response I made .The original contention was straightforward- “Ayurveda is quackery” . None of what you said has anything to do with it.
What you’re doing is arguing that the only form of medicine is modern medicine. That’s untrue and all those websites prove you wrong.
Your entire argument is about the fact that Ayurveda - and you can apply that same standard to every other system of traditional medicine - does not follow the statistical basis of modern medicine. Well no shit , it’s traditional medicine.
More fundamentally it is still medicine - if it was quackery then NIH, NHS, ICMR, JHU, Mayo Clinic and wouldn’t be listing it with information on how to utilize it. If they were offering informative data on quackery they’d have pages on ‘radium water’ too.
Let me define quackery for you, since you're dancing around it, off Brittanica.com
Quackery: the characteristic practice of quacks or charlatans, who pretend to knowledge and skill that they do not possess, particularly in medicine.
In other words, Cancer Research UK explicitly lists something that the original commentator asserts is quackery. Therefore, if he is true, Cancer Research UK explicitly is ok with listing information about practices that allegedly constitute quackery.
The reality is that the other commenter is dead wrong. He quoted wikipedia, which got its facts wrong. He didn't even read the linked IMA document, which if he did, he did not understand.
Ayurveda, like Chinese Traditional Medicine, is an alternative traditional medicine system that's been around for a few millenia. Its uses and constraints are well known within India, and it is incredibly popular. Passing it off as quackery because one can't be bothered to read the very material they quote is dumb.
Ah Wikipedia! You should read what the IMA link from there actually says:
http://www.ima-india.org/ima/left-side-bar.php?pid=291
It says quacks practice various medical activities, including Ayurveda. Did you have trouble with understanding that ? Still going to insist the actual field is quackery ? Fine.
The NIH supports quackery:
https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/ayurvedic-medicine-in-depth
And John Hopkins:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/ayurveda
So does the NHS:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/03/19/nhs-trial-ayurvedic-herbal-remedy-cut-antibiotics-coughs-colds/
And Cancer Research UK
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-general/treatment/complementary-alternative-therapies/individual-therapies/ayurvedic-medicine
Tsk tsk. Got your task cut out for you to convince them otherwise. Use wikipedia. That'll help you.
The President of India is a so called ‘untouchable’. So were two of his predecessors . The Prime Minister is a ‘backward caste’ . The chief architect of the Indian constitution was a Columbia and LSE educated ‘untouchable’ whose education was funded by the upper caste raja of his state . I am an ‘untouchable’ .
Stop trying to sound like YOU know anything about caste .
There isn't any 'government target' - there's no reservation in the private sector.
https://info.the451group.com/rs/331-DYY-590/images/WITS_graphs_1.jpg
Indian enrollment in IT related engineering streams (>45%, on par with what I've seen in university) vastly outstrips UK (<20%) and US (just over 20%). Even heavy engineering/manufacturing/construction has almost 30% women enrolled vs 20% in UK and under 20% in US. In India, becoming an engineer is a coveted educational goal, for women as much as for men.
If you want to make an argument about composition, then find the data for it.
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