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Ringing Bells' India-Only Android Phone To Run About $4 (freedom251.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Freedom 251 is the name of a new affordable Android smartphone which is going on sale in India. It features an 4-core 1.3 Ghz Processor, with 1GB RAM and 8GB internal memory, and runs an Android Lollipop 5.1 distribution complete with civilian and government applications for Indian citizens. It is being heavily subsidized to make up for the benefits that it will bring to the people who could never afford a smartphone before. Ars Technica notes that the phone is apparently not carrier-subsidized, but as Pocket Now points out, "[t]he nation's defence minister will be at the launch event, a sign that the government has heavily subsidized the project in line with its developmental prerogatives."
India is a very class conscious society. When I visit India I use a cheap Nokia-the-indestructable phone for calls when not connected to wi-fi. My nephews and nieces call it "servant-maid's phone" and would not be seen dead using it. They would rather buy a cheap unreliable knock off that has an apple logo on it, rather than a reliable Nokia. This 251Rs phone will be instantly marked as the servant-maid, rickshaw-puller, veggie-hawker, coster-monger phone and most of middle class will eschew it. That is actually good. The government subsidy will actually reach the poor. If the manufacturer delivers a half decent product at that price after taking all the govt funds.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's a subsidized phone, only it's subsidized by the government. ... Mounds of debt added to the government's obligations
In many places, education is subsidized by the government. And costs more than $4. If it increases the GDP or saves money elsewhere, this program could easily pay itself off. Even if not, spending a little to improve the citizen's quality of life is itself a valid function of government.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This. When my fifth-grader wanted a music player and a handheld to play games and text, I walked up to the pay-as-you-go phone section in Walmart and bought a $40 Android smartphone. My son hooked it up to WiFi and now communicates with me via text apps. There was never any need to activate the pay-as-you-go phone service.
Please keep in mind that India made it to Mars orbit on the first attempt. Neither the US, Russia, China or Japan can say that - only Europe and India.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Simple, a couple of years ago when I was back in India, I remember the guy sitting in my next seat on bus trip booking a laborer who climbs up the cocunut tree over the mobile phone. Mind you the laborer answered the phone while he was on the very top of the tree. Without the phone he would have waited for another day to get work! The notoriously poor communication facilities, before the wireless became available played a major role in hindering the development. The connectivity has enhanced the economic activity many fold already!
That's a rather short-sighted view. Other countries have shown that providing people in underdeveloped regions with access to information can have a big quality on their quality of life and their income. If you're in a remote region, it helps a lot if you can get up-to-date info on markets, weather, agricultural data, and this can provide medical info, education, and access to governmental services as well. If you're a farmer, this can help protect your crops, improve the yield, and get a better price. If you provide other services you can expand your market (it may be worth travelling to the next village to provide your service, but only if you know that there's someone in the village who actually needs you).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In India where Poverty runs rampant, how does this effort help? Children will still be starving, while manufactures of these subsidized phones will be getting fat. There may be a place and time for a government subsidy for cell phones, but in this case, in India, I'm not so sure it's the right place or the right time.
The kind of generation upon generation endemic poverty exists because of lack of access, lack of communication, lack of transport, lack of awareness of employment options, lack of information. Take a subsistence farmer or a contract farmer for example. He is completely dependent on rain and weather conditions to get a reasonably successful crop that will give his family just about enough calories to last the rest of the year, and a little bit of money for other survival needs. One bad crop, one bad season means that he has to take a loan from a loanshark / local moneylender at interest rates of 3-5% a week. Inevitably he will become indebted for life, and if another bad season follows, his children with either die of malnutrition or he will commit suicide by drinking pesticide. Or often both. Not necessarily in the same order.
The other big category of poverty stricken people in India are the ones that are less tied to the land. Part time laborers, the ones who work in construction sites, brick kilns, mines, public or private construction projects, etc.
In many of these categories of people, there is a very real benefit to having a cell phone and having rudimentary internet access. Even if not the internet or even wikipedia, to mesaging apps like whatsapp, weather forecasting apps, apps that display job opportunities for temp workers, daily wage laborers etc.
A subsistence farmer or a daily wage laborer could benefit enormously from access to job opportunities, access to better information about the weather, commodity prices, prices of pesticides, grains etc. Or even just the ability to message relatives and be better networked and better informed. Consider the fact that a daily wage laborer in a big city makes 10x the money than a daily wage worker in a remote inaccessible village. Not only that, the big city laborer is also employed many more days in a year.
So why does the poverty stricken villager not move to the big city? Why does the villager let his children become matchsticks? Why does the villager commit suicide even when he knows it also means a death sentence for his family? Why is he, for lack of a better word, so *dumb*? You think a charity organization that will visit his village once a decade and will give him a sack of rice will help him in any way in the long run??
India is a work in progress in many areas, but feeding the economic engine so you can have more skilled workers - yes, no matter what you might think of outsourced Indian developers and helpdesks they're skilled for India - paying taxes so they can build out more schools, power, water, sanitation etc. might be more productive in the long run. These are not the spoilt brats of the western world, if you give them the chance to learn many will work hard to improve their life. A phone is a pretty damn cheap tool to give them opportunities. And they are working on those other things, but like China they pretty much have to pull themselves up. Nobody can afford to really help hundreds of millions of people on foreign aid.
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