Over the top

By Nandini Ramachandran

Numbers are a notoriously relative factor within Indian politics, existing only to be massaged at every corner. The distinctive semantics of numbers is nowhere clearer than in the convenient slippage between lakhs and millions in the media’s perpetual quest for the more glamorous statistic. 5 million is, after all, a far more imposing figure than 50 lakhs, unless one has cultivated the esoteric skill of fluently flitting back and forth between numerical systems. In a country where “crorepati” and “millionaire” are practically synonymous, it’s safe to assume such literacy remains an elite skill even among the educated. Add to that the inevitable and instinctive association between millions and dollars, and a million is virtually guaranteed more eyeballs than a paltry 10 lakhs.

Conversely, when an effort is being made to downplay the magnitude of a certain value,  the ingenious “hundreds of lakhs” are trotted out in defiance of mathematical logic. Corporate accounts, for instance, enumerate in the hundreds and even thousands of lakhs by default. But the big money still talks in crores, the Indian billion, seamlessly transiting between the hoi polloi and the haute. By this marker, the recent sale of 3G spectrum to telecom majors within India was almost too haute to touch.

The Government of India laughed its way to the Reserve Bank this past week, even as the Pakistani Government was busy ejecting its country out of the internet revolution. 3G spectrum, which enables the further diffusion of the web across India, sold for twice its estimated revenue, at a whopping 67,700-odd crores (677 billion rupees or 15 billion dollars, for those who prefer an alternate gloss).  I should reiterate, before my compatriots get smug about our relative freedoms, that this diffusion is strictly an elite phenomenon, as anything that assumes more than barely-there literacy is bound to be. Besides, it’s easy to forget that internet access is expensive in the subcontinent, a reality that posher phones are not likely to address. The average internet monthly plan can (and does) feed entire families for weeks, if one neglects the attendant requirement of a computer/smart phone. My internet bill is half the (optimal) monthly minimum wage. Despite our burgeoning cyber-cafe culture, this disparity is not easily resolved. The web has been a home to many of us while remaining a myth to many more.

Sermons aside, when news of the final 3G deal broke on 19th May, Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was asked how the windfall was to be spent “for social interest” by a zealous (if naive) television journalist. The minister acted coy, if only because he realises the bounty is hardly about to reach those who most need it: India’s budget allocates a paltry 900 crores towards agricultural production, indisputably India’s poorest profession (after, possibly, day-labour, but that is not even considered a profession within India’s three pronged system of manufacturing, agriculture, and services). We are, they tell us, a perennially poor country. So poor we can’t afford to offset an obscene 16% inflation rate on basic food grains and commodities.

Well, anyway. Woe betide the less fortunate. It is, after all, what they are there for: to be used as lightning rods for all the squalor and misery we live amidst. To most of my peers, the sale of 3G spectrum deserves attention because it marks a transition in our paradigm for mobile information (the pun is intended, but forced: I am using mobile as an adjective, not a noun). It’s a shift embodied by the iPhone: once 3G settles down, the iPhone will go from being a bewildering and largely useless gizmo to another splendid toy for the social climber’s stable. We are a young, voracious nation unwilling to be left out of the gadget wars, a fact telecom companies obviously respect enough to cough up such astonishing amounts. That is, I suppose, all for the better, if it ensures that I will never be bereft of wikipedia. And I can’t wait to be able to stream movies while I read, rock, surf, skype, and play video games on the train to heaven.