“Digital Hartal”: A strike for rise in Internet Price

October 31, 2014 – Digital Hartal. A day where the “netizens” were said to go on a strike to prove to the telecom companies that their price on net packs for prepaid and post paid are sky rocketed and very high. The term Netizens is derived from two terms- net users and citizens which combine to form netizens. Cool huh? But was the strike successful?!

How this came about?

As you might have noticed, telecom companies are constantly increasing prices of all the services they offer like the internet packs, call conference, call waiting and so on.. This strike is for the Internet packs price which have been on the constant rise. All the major carriers like Vodafone, Airtel and Idea have raised their price with Airtel leading the squad.

Let me narrate a similar incident in Britain where a monopolist bread company started increasing its prices for the bread. The people got agitated and they started boycotting the product (i.e bread). The company on witnessing the agitation agreed to reduce the price of the bread and having this incident as a role model our netizens are calling for a strike which is meant to have the same effect.

The price of the packs were around 50s in the beginning of 2013. Slowly it started to rise. From A Vodafone point of view- 1GB of Internet was Rs 98. Then gradually Vodafone offered Rs 124 as 1GB, while Rs 98 had an allowable limit of 650MB. This was with the interchangeability of speed from 2G to 3G and vice versa. Then Rs 148 pack tagged along housed as the 1GB pack. Now 1GB pack is Rs 196 which is of 2G speed while the Rs 98 pack is of 500MB value which is also only 2G. The Rs 124 pack now gives about 650MB of only 2G speed. There are now separate 3G packs which are very costly.

How message is spreading?

The message is mainly spreading through Facebook and Whatsapp. One of the message reads like this “You know what to do on the 31st of October…. blah blah blah”. The important point I want to highlight is that the message says that the Prime minister Mr Modi is also involved.

Questions, from my opinion

Now let me move on to the questions I would like to ask you people. First of all, how do you think this strike will help? If you are saying turn off the internet pack for a day, and the telecom companies will encounter a loss of 300-400 crores, how is that even remotely possible? If you have already given your share of the money for the internet pack, how will the telecom companies encounter such huge losses? Please be logical. And does Mr. Narendra Modi not have any other job other than to support strikes? Do not exaggerate things. To the telecom companies- Increasing prices of day-to-day basics (yes, you have to admit it, it has become a basic) is not fair. Play Fair and you’ll get your share of money.

If you think I missed out anything, please do let me know in the comments section below.