Quote:
Originally Posted by Samurai We have the perfect recipe for stopping any Elon Musk from being produced. Instead, our system is engineered such that only wheelers and dealers who know how to grease the government wheels would see any success. Meanwhile innovators and researchers are either filling customs forms or moving to countries where they can operate freely. |
What I said two years ago,
Rajiv Bajaj said recently.
Quote:
If your innovation in the country depends on the Government approval or the judicial process, it will not be a case of 'Made in India', but 'Mad in India'.
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When I last posted on this thread, my company was co-developing a hardware controller (we supplied the firmware) with another firm, for a government customer. While the hardware cost and the software development cost was not much, the bureaucracy and the delay caused by government alone cost us two times the invoice price. We decided to discontinue the product after successful delivery. We can't afford to develop hardware solutions in India. We lost many months just while moving the components around the country. The only reason why the Software is viable in India is because it can be delivered over Internet and can't be held hostage at every state border or even district border.
But not all software, not if that software brings competition to entrenched big players, who can influence government policy.
Some of you may be familiar with WebRTC, which allows modern browsers to act like IP phones, without any additional plugins. Corporate websites, instead of listing a phone number, they can list an phone URL. Click on it and you will be talking to that company using voice, except it skips all the PSTN infrastructure. Since this is PC-to-PC voip, it is legal in India.
Similarly, WebRTC can open up numerous new applications that were unheard of before.
We were wondering about providing that as a cloud service in India. But knowing Indian bureaucracy, I decided to check on what kind of barriers have been raised. I was truly astounded.
This has been categorized under access services, since it is considered a voice service. That means it can take business away from PSTN. Just like email took business away from post office, voip or WebRTC can take business away from PSTN channels like landline and mobile connections. Never mind it uses data connections from the ISPs, government doesn't want the gentle giant Telcos to lose business at any cost.
What it takes to offer cloud access service in USA:
1) Buy a server and setup the software.
2) Get Internet/VOIP-trunk connection from any Telco.
3) Start providing services to the customers in
anywhere in the world.
4) Pay corporate taxes if you make any profits. There is no other license involved.
What it takes to offer cloud access service in India:
1) The company should have ₹2.5C minimum equity.
2) The company should have ₹2.5C minimum networth.
3) Pay ₹1C to the government as entry fee.
4) Provide Performance Bank Guarantee (PBG) of ₹10C to the government, which they will confiscate if they find any violation in license compliance.
5) Provide Financial Bank Guarantee (FBG) of ₹2.5C to the government, which they will confiscate if they find any violation in license compliance.
6) The application processing fee is ₹50K.
7) All the above fee are for one metro area or telecom circle. If you want to provide service in Mumbai, pay the above fees. But if you want to cover whole of MH, pay it again. Repeat it for every state, since each state is a different telecom circle.
8) Finally, buy a server and set it up in that service area. Do this for each service area.
9) Get a good Internet/VOIP-trunk connection from any Telco by showing the license. Repeat this in every service area.
10) Start providing services to the customers
only in the service areas you have licensed for.
11) Give 8% of the total revenue to the government, this is before tax.
12) Pay corporate taxes if your company is still making any profit due to divine miracle.
With modern technology one can provide cloud services anywhere in the world from a single location. The concept of service area of an Internet based technology is meaningless. And here we have an incredibly greedy government ensuring that only deep pocketed companies can do business and small companies like ours are kept out. The margin in cloud telephony has become so thin, this kind of license fees are simply out of the question.
I sometimes wonder, what if Indian government had developed the Internet, instead of US government?
Answer: There would have been an extra layer between datalink layer and network layer. They would call it license layer. If the packets leave the local network, they will encounter this license layer, before they can reach the network layer. The packets will stay in the license layer until the local government is satisfied that the sender than paid license fees. This layer will be implemented by the local government at every state.
If you want to send anything over Internet, you need to buy routers that has local implementation of license layer. There would TCP/IP/LP implementation for every state. If you want to send packets beyond India, you need the central TCP/IP/LP stack too. There will be huge cottage in India building these native stacks for India. The vision of Make in India will become reality.
I also thought about a corruption layer, but then discarded idea. That will never work because it infers cashless.