1. India has 10K AICTE approved engineering colleges. While some of these are IITs and NITs that you might've heard of, beyond the top 50-100 colleges, there is _no support system_ for the students. The curriculum of most state universities still updates in 5 years with little autonomy given to colleges. As a result, most students still see Java, C and dotNet as the universe of CS.
2. India's gender inequality in the workplace picks pace from higher education. In the college we mentor in, there are ~400 boys and ~50 girls. Out of which, 30 boys and 5 girls actively code today. Since there is substantial gender based teasing/harassment, most colleges in India lock women up post 8pm. Collaboration doesn't kick off because of such low density of students. Especially for girls.
3. We run this with 200 students over whatsapp. We have groups for fostering reading, internships & jobs, AMAs, competitive programming and so on. If you would like to help us scale this community, get in touch and we can talk in detail.
You're doing an important thing. Rather than just working with students, also reach out to experienced people in the industry. Even in a city like Bangalore, I feel the industry is too disconnected from the colleges.
We do. Come do an AMA for us next week. Tomorrow's is by a senior from the college who cracked GATE, went to IIT-D and is now working with Visa in Bangalore. EMail me.
If you haven't, Netflix's has a documentary called 13TH[1] where a loop hole in the slavery abolishment act was used to mass incarcerate blacks in the USA. As indicated in other threads, USA is inhabited with just 5% of the world's population but runs 25% of all prisons.
Whatsapp has no setting to disable the "online" flag when i have opened the app, and a bunch of things mentioned can be built on top of just this.
I think this shows how some seemingly trivial data points on an individual level can allow one to build something way more than the sum of parts at a mass surveillance level.
India | Telecom | 110M subscribers on-boarded in 100 days
To summarize: Jio, which is our cellular telephony play, now is the world's largest cellular data network (pumping 22,000 TB per day) and onboards a million customers a day! We now have 110 million subscribers (in ~100 days).
This became possible when the telco regulators here gave a go ahead to use the Govt of India's pet biometric auth project Aadhaar[1] to accept electronic KYCs(proof of identity+address). A typical SIM issue took us <3m enabling Jio to issue 1M+ SIM cards a day in a developing country where printouts of PoI and PoA were mandatory.
This infrastructure as the physical layer coupled with the fact that India has 40% YoY growth rate in Internet penetration[2] has opened up a fintech opportunity in a $50B market that BCG and Google estimate[3] to be in the tune of $500B+ by 2020.
Disclosure: I work with JioMoney's product team in Bangalore. We are building the payments infrastructure on top of Jio and other telcos. We're hiring![4]
By their math, acquiring those 100 million customers cost 25 billion USD. The writer is sceptical that Jio will ever make that money back.
Personally I think it's awesome that an Indian billionaire is spending his money on local digital infrastructure. Even if Jio doesn't become hugely profitable, its network seems to be a boon to India.
They beta tested the sim cards only on their own Lyf branded phones which are some of the cheapest 4G phones available. They plan on releasing more phones, an FTTH broadband service, they already have movies and music streaming services, they have small portable wifi hotspot devices, there's news that they'll enter the D2H TV service market too. I think they'll make their money back with a combination of the hardware and services.
The competition has been the biggest boon for the public even more so than the services they're offering, forced every major network to lower their prices which I hope will have a good long term effect for the public.
I will be downvoted for saying this:
Most of the subscribers were issued 5 sims per aadhar number.In that sense its really around 20 million subscribers each with around 5 sims in their name.And anybody can be sure that they aren't using all the issued sims.Also most of the subscribers have stopped using the sims after the freebies was called off.
I don't think HN would downvote you for having an alternative datapoint. =)
That said, you are right to a degree but the only multiple sim holding report I saw was Truecaller saying that 46% of its installs are people with dual sims. This was last year. I'd love to hear about your sources and proxies about 5.
That said, there are multiple longer run plays here:
- onboarding 1M/SIMs/day.
- pumping that much data volume/day.
- commoditisation of data packs.
- this is just the data layer of digital infra, value layers over this would be built in next 2-5 years. It is a sub percentage point of GDP growth if you measure not just the ARPU that Jio makes, but what every business makes here on top of this.
- productivity growth is hard to measure in terms of short run revenue of one company. This is digital infrastructure akin to roadways, railroads and electricity.
It should be noted that this was achieved by giving 6 months of 4G data (1GB/day at > 6Mbps) + free telephony, for a mere $6.
Things should normalize once the freebies stop; Jio however will have a massive collection of Indians Biometric identities (and much else skimmed off of "Big Brother" Aadhar) and their browsing habits, which we currently have no idea how they'll exploit. Worse, we have no regulation over Aadhar's data-sharing, nor over the privacy of citizens.
India's state telephony company now injects ads into non-HTTPS sites, and tracks users using the services of a private company. Considering Ambani's complete lack of basic ethics, one can be sure that they'll be much more clever with it than the generic dolts at BSNL.
> Jio however will have a massive collection of Indians Biometric identities
Citation or shut up. I'm no fan of Aadhar but even a cursory look into it's authentication shows that it does not share this information with services. It only acts as a o-auth like service.
Are you stupid ? Because it strikes me that you are phenomenally so.
While Aadhar does not share biometric features, by being an authentication oracle, it makes it trivial for any massive organization like Jio to build their own second-party 'verified by Aadhar' databases which have even fewer legislative regulations (if that were at all possible).
+1 for Jio entry. So far existing vendors like airtel,vodafone are robbing customers. We used to pay 250Rs(~4usd) for 1GB 3G/4G data. Now with Jio entries, prices came down to 30GB/250rs. Benefits the end-user.
I have not really followed the fintech much but understand the Telecom side of things. You seem like an expert on this space in India and hence my questions:
1. Do you think making everything Aadhar based is a good idea?
2. How much awareness is there about privacy issues related to Aadhar?
3. What risk do you see which would derail the $500B projection for Fintech in India? Also it wasn't clear if that projection was the total payment transactions or the market opportunity for players (e.g. commissions etc.).
A particular section (to which I belong) is quite afraid with the direction India is taking. Reddit /r/india has many discussions along lines that I'll summarize.
- Aadhar was forced into being without legislation or check/balances.
- The guy heading it is Nilekani, a not so ethical dude, who once ran Infy, and has quite a lot of
influence with the right people, both in the US and India.[1]
- Previous admin. was likely planning on making it mandatory "citizen id", but was
pushed back by the courts.
- Current admin. has magically turned back on their erstwhile opposition due to "a presentation"
and have finally made it mandatory, for everything from passports, SIM cards, and tax refunds.
- Aadhar has no legislative curtailment. There is nothing stopping them from forcing the
collection of my DNA, and then selling those to some insurance company in a few years.
- There is also nothing stopping the vogons in the Indian state (and the corporatocracy it serves)
from getting hold of all my data... because you know "national security". Accountability is the
last thing you'd expect of the Indian state; transparency probably being penultimate.
- This means that anyone who declines to be part of the Animal farm, can neither leave the
country nor work there. Jaitley really screwed us over. Naturally this is dressed up as a "us-
vs-them" "nationalistic" "black-money hunting" "anti-western/left" move, and this is what
comments on Indian newssites reflect. Ironic that the system will be used to clamp down even
harder on the people who belong to a English colony run by Brown sahibs, which has made it
its goal to destroy every culture, language and religion that are its heritage.
- Next stop is likely the complete destruction of cash (and thus opposition), by tying it all back to
Aadhar (which the parent is cheering for). Very very scary future.. will be moving out before the
prison cell closes shut.
[1] India's IT Industry does not serve India; now that the outsourcing play is coming to a halt, many are looking to diversify. One way out is to secure massive contracts from the state.
"This means that anyone who declines to be part of the Animal farm, can neither leave the country nor work there" --- you mean 'either leave the country or not work there?"
In other words, it could perhaps correct itself in those many seconds but was allowed only small degrees of change.