-The Hindu Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. One winter morning, in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, I was watching a group of Adivasi kids peering into their mobile phones. The early morning sun was mellow, and they were so engrossed that they did not notice me drawing near. “We are doing Bultoo...

-The Hindu The public now sees the Internet not just in market terms, but as a social phenomenon that requires public interest regulation. In its aggressive campaign for Free Basics, couched in simplistic developmental language, Facebook underestimated the political sophistication of the Indian public. It must be regretting it now. The social networking service’s reportedly Rs. 100-crore campaign, through double full-page newspaper advertisements, billboards and television, appears simply to have congealed public...

-The Hindu We need to apply a new credo, digital dynamism, that recognises the complex web that is the internet today An unseasonably warm new year has been substituted by a densely spewing fog over the concept of net neutrality. Net neutrality is a specific approach to the economic regulation of the internet. It is based on the premise of the ‘end to end design principle’, in which traffic on the internet is...

-The Hindu We need to provide full Internet at prices people can afford, not privilege private platforms. This is where India’s regulatory system has to step in The airwaves, the newspapers and even the online space are now saturated with a Rs. 100 crore campaign proclaiming that Internet connectivity for the Indian poor is a gift from Facebook which a few churlish net neutrality fundamentalists are opposing. In its campaign, Facebook is...

-Hindustan Times Declining data cost is boosting data traffic and internet usage in India and will take rural users to 87 million by December-end and 106 million by end-March 2016, a study by the communications ministry says. India has overtaken US and is behind only China on internet usage, and the government expects user-base to hit 450 million by next year-end. “Our studies have shown that the growth of e-commerce activities and government-to-citizen online...