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Every other day, some brain-dead North Indian middle-class bastard on Reddit or LinkedIn vomits a post about how Modiji—or his crony capitalist buddies, take your pick—gave us the "cheapest data in the world."
They scream "Digital India!" like it’s a war cry. They tell you to be grateful. Grateful that the benevolent overlords at Jio and Airtel have deigned to give us affordable 4K streaming.
Grateful? Fuck that.
Grateful involves consent. This isn't charity; it's a hostage situation.
Sure, if you’re an urban, upper-middle-class brat whose biggest problem is whether to order from Swiggy or Zomato, ₹200 a month feels like nothing. You consume 500GB of data watching brain-rot reels? Then yes, for you, it is cheap.
But what if you are a peasant? What if you are a daily wage laborer who bought a feature phone just to stay reachable for work? What if you are a grandmother who only wants to hear her grandkids' voice once a week?
You are fucked. Royally.
Remember 2010? Of course you don't; you have the memory span of a goldfish. But I remember.
In 2010, you could walk into a shop, throw ₹30 on the counter, and get "talktime." And that balance sat there. It waited for you. It didn't expire. It didn't demand a monthly ransom. You used it when you needed it. Your phone number was a utility, not a subscription service.
Today? That model is dead. Murdered. Buried behind the flashy lights of "Unlimited Voice" bundles.
It didn't happen overnight. It was a slow strangulation.
They didn't make calling cheaper. They made existing expensive.
Let’s bring in some actual numbers, shall we? Not the sanitized bullshit TRAI feeds you, but the real economic weight of this scam.
The sangis love to compare us to the West. "Look! Data in the US costs $50!" Yeah, you dimwits, and the average American earns in an hour what a vast majority of Indians earn in a week.
Let's look at the neighbors. Let's look at Pakistan. Yeah, that "failed state."
India? The minimum "entry fee" to the Jio/Airtel club is effectively ₹189-199/month ($2.40).
We are paying 10x what a Pakistani pays just to have a working phone number.
Now, factor in income. In China, that basic connectivity cost is a rounding error—less than 0.2% of the median monthly income. In India? For a minimum wage worker earning maybe ₹7,000-8,000 a month, that ₹199 is nearly 2.5% of their total survival budget.
Think about that. A construction worker has to toil for a full day in the heat, carrying bricks, just to pay Airtel enough money so they don't block his incoming calls.
One day of labor. Just to exist on the network.
And let’s talk about that "28 days" validity bullshit.
In the old world—the sane world—a month had 30 or 31 days. In the Jio-Airtel corporate metaverse, a month has 28 days. Why? Because $365 / 28 = 13.03$.
They literally invented a 13th month.
They are billing you for a month that doesn't exist on any calendar in human history. Every year, you pay for an extra recharge cycle that you didn't ask for, didn't need, and certainly didn't consent to. It’s a silent 8% inflation on top of the already exorbitant prices. It’s theft, plain and simple, disguised as "validity."
TRAI says there are about 150 million feature phone users in India.
These aren't people engaging in "digital detox." These are people who can't afford smartphones. They are the poorest of the poor. They have devices that can make calls and maybe send an SMS. That’s it.
Yet, they are forced to buy "bundled" plans. Imagine walking into a grocery store to buy just milk, and the shopkeeper says, "Sorry, milk is only sold in a combo pack with a bottle of single-malt whiskey."
"But I don't drink whiskey," you say. "Too bad," he sneers. "It's the Cheapest Whiskey in the World! You should be grateful!"
That is the reality for 150 million Indians. They are paying for 4G/5G data they physically cannot consume because the operators refuse to sell them voice-only plans at a fair price. They are prisoners of a market that has decided they don't matter.
This is what economists call a "Regressive Tax"—but I call it a scam.
The poor—who consume almost zero data—are subsidizing the rich.
My neighbor, my uncle—people who watch nothing—pay ₹199 so that you can stream Netflix in HD for cheap. The villager with some micromax or lava or someknown feature phone is cross-subsidizing the startup bro with an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The "unlimited voice" bundled with data isn't a feature; it's a trap. It forces the voice-only user to pay for data they physically cannot use. It’s like forcing a diabetic to buy a combo meal with a large Coke and then telling them, "But the burger is cheaper this way!"
So the next time someone says "Data Revolution," tell them to check their privilege. Tell them to look at the GDP per Capita. Tell them to look at the Purchasing Power Parity.
Or better yet, tell them to fuck off.
Because this isn't a revolution. It’s a ransom note. And we’re all paying it, whether we want the data or not.