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VOIP to be Made Illegal in India

Posted by samzenpus on from the the-internet-is-not-for-talking dept.

Krish writes "Providers like Skype, Yahoo, Net2phone, Dialpad, etc. will not be able to offer VOIP in India under the proposed govt. clampdown. BPOs and other call centers will face the axe if they use any of the VOIP services provided by the above companies. It is not clear if this clampdown will affect regular home users."

3 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Re:FUCKIN-A YEAH!! by raju1kabir · · Score: 0, Troll

    I don't care about offshoring jobs and I don't have many problems with telemarketers, but I do find that almost all of my Indian call centre experiences are negative.

    Every time I get routed to one, I end up talking to someone who has no power to do anything, no access to information beyond what I could get from the web or from the automated voice response system, and the critical thinking skills of a muffin.

    Fortunately many companies seem to be backing off of their headling plunges into delegating crucial customer relations roles to unknown low-skilled workers on the other side of the planet. The reason they got in there was because there were a lot of English-speaking people who worked cheap, and now they're starting to realise those criteria alone weren't enough. There are other places (e.g., Philippines, Malaysia) that meet those requirements, and also feature governments that are open to foreign commerce and populations that are positively inclined toward the outside world.

    I think this VoIP move by the Indian government reflects the reasons why call centre offshoring there has been a failure (and after working there, I could have predicted this a long time ago). Some broad generalisations that I will stand behind:

    • India is really a pretty xenophobic place, generally hostile to most everything non-Indian.
    • India is deeply conservative and fearful of change.
    • The Indian educational system penalises innovation and creative thinking.
    • Indian politics are always parochial. If a proposal doesn't somehow poke a stick in the eye of those bastards in the next village/city/state/country, then it's not going to pass.

    This is the mentality that leads to shutting out VoIP services that could dramatically enhance the ability of Indian business to compete globally in new and exciting ways. Rather than eliminate economic friction by reducing taxes on services with a high productivity multiplier value, they would rather bureaucratise the sector into the ground and collect some short-term revenue from those damned foreigners.

    --
    "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
  2. You are, of course, shitting us. by PHAEDRU5 · · Score: 0, Troll

    If you think the average Indian on the street can't out-think the average Indian in Government, well, you just haven't met - wossname - Ghandi.

    --
    668: Neighbour of the Beast
  3. "India is really a pretty xenophobic place..." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    "...generally hostile to most everything non-Indian."

    Which is of course why most Indians would gnaw their own arms off for the chance to live just about anywhere but India.

    No?