MUMBAI - At the
al-Amin Communication Center in a muggy evening in
Colaba, southern Mumbai, proprietor Babu has neither heard
of the Indian government's new Internet policies to
boost his business nor cares to know. At shouting
distance from Leopold Cafe, a landmark tourist watering
hole near the Gateway of India, his Internet parlor
continues surviving in a business marked by short lives.
"I don't know," Babu grinned above
his T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, bemused how he managed
to last longer that two other neighboring cyber cafes
that appeared and disappeared in a hurry. "Maybe
it's because of tourists." Or maybe because he
also runs an international-telephone-call booth and a Western
Union money-transfer center.
Generally, India's 13,000-odd cyber-cafes sell Internet access from
50 cents an hour to US$5 packages for 10 hours, as Babu does.
Major chains such as Sify Iway, with 2,000
ergonomically friendly cyber cafes across 66 cities and claiming
to serve 500,000 customers a month, do better than
single cyber-cafes, which have a tougher life. The government's
10-point information-technology (IT) policy hopes to bring better news for the
likes of these.
In a bid to build and globally project
India's IT muscle, the government last week announced
measures to make registration easier for Indian
domain names ending with ".in". Communication and information
technology minister Dayanidhi Maran announced
that ".in" domain names could be registered for
Rs250 ($5) a year and in 24 hours. Until now, Indian
Internet service providers have depended on cheaper
and better quality international servers, mostly in
the United States. Currently, only about 7,000 among the
500,000-odd registered Indian domain names have a ".in"
registration.
About 60 million
registered Internet domain names exist worldwide. Some 40
million of these are in the generic top-level domain
(gtld) category, such as .com, .net or .org. The remaining
20 million are in the country-code top-level domain (cctld)
category. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN) that assigns domain names globally
has given individual countries the right to register
domain names in the second category under specific
guidelines.
The Indian government wants to
boost the number of its Internet users from the
current 25 million to 40 million by 2010. Last week's
announcement fulfilled a promise made in a 10-point agenda
announced by Maran on May 26, when he said, "My priority would
be to focus on personal computer penetration and
thereby bringing cyber-connectivity to every citizen."
The new ".in" domain-registration drive is
supposed to reflect India's global dominance in IT. "The
process is part of a plan to make India an IT
superpower," Amitabh Singhal, senior vice president of
the New Delhi-based Internet Service Providers
Association of India (ISPAI), told Asia Times Online.
But Singhal made it clear that
".in" registrations by themselves would not be enough.
He blamed infrastructure gaps, failed bandwidth
promises and higher operating costs for choking Internet
growth in India. According to the government's figures,
India's subscriber base grew more than 200% per year
between March 1999 and March 2001. But the growth rate began
to plunge thereafter, largely due to the factors Singhal
outlined.
As a remedy, ISPAI partnered
the government in launching a new National Internet
Exchange of India (NIXI) to route 'Net traffic more efficiently
in India. Some 190 Internet service providers (ISPs) are
to be connected to NIXI, registered as a non-profit
company. The exchange aims to ensure that Indian 'Net
traffic remains within India, to reduce costs and
increase security. Four exchange nodes have been set up
at the industrial township of Noida (near Delhi),
Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
While
Internet professionals welcomed such moves as the national Internet
exchange, not everyone is impressed with the .in drive
and Maran's claims that the policy would "facilitate the
proliferation" of Internet. "It's too little too late,"
said Vijay Mukhi, one of the pioneers behind spreading
the Internet in India in the mid 1990s. "I would advise
against moving from an existing .com domain name to a
new .in name." He feels the trouble of maintaining two
websites is not worth making the change.
Speaking to Asia Times Online from his popular
computer training institute in central Mumbai, Mukhi
recalled how he wanted to register a .in domain name in
the 1990s but was refused by the National Center for
Software Technology. "You are an individual, not a
company," he was sternly told. Now he says his Vijay
Mukhi domain name is too well established for him to
feel the need for a change to an .in extension, never
mind the national glory.
Others
such as Amit Gupta are ecstatic. "Are you sure? Can you
point to a link that states the official
announcement? If that's true then I'm going for it!" he posted a
note below the news of the .in registration at
a technology website. ISPAI's Amitabh Singhal says moves such as the
.in promotion are targeted at Indians abroad as much
as home-based companies. "Just as Yahoo and MSN
have country-specific domain names, we want to ensure
an Indian presence for Indian residents,
government entities, public-service organizations and businesses."
Rural India, with a population of 700 million,
is the next big market. "Despite several attempts over
the last decade," groaned a consultation paper released
by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on telecom
services in India, "the gap between penetration of
telephony in rural [1.7%] and urban [19.7%] areas is
widening and measures need to be taken to reduce this
gap."
To spread the spirit, the home page of Tata
India.com, the majority shareholder of the erstwhile
state-controlled Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd
(VSNL), sports an orange-turbaned camel rider in
a desert surfing the 'Net with a camel in the background.
VSNL launched Internet services in India in August 1995
and enjoyed a monopoly until November 1998.
In an official document, the IT Ministry quotes
a telecom-based initiative by the Thai government
to promote local quality Thai products in the
global market, the One Tambon One Product initiative. The
Indian governmental wants urban India similarly to
outsource its IT-based services to rural India. The
government says it could outsource works like
digitization of land records, data-entry work, and birth and
death certificates to agencies or small entrepreneurs in
villages. "This would enable these enterprises to create
wealth in rural areas," the document says.
But
for now, all that the beleaguered Indian farmer needs to
escape crop failure are water, electricity and honest
seeds. Internet can come another day.
Raja
M is an independent writer based in Mumbai,
India.
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