How should an Indian State think about its Mobile Technology Policy?
Originally published 10 May, 2012
Assumed Goals of the State (say Karnataka):
1. Attract the best and brightest Indian start-ups and funders to target Karnataka as a market and place to do business
2. Encourage local-language applications that provide societal value to a broad audience
3. Encourage new business models to thrive — e.g. Flipkart is not dependent on the telcos to collect money
4. Maximize the utility and usage of services, to both create value for citizens and create new potential tax revenue sources in the long term
Non-goals:
Try to choose winning technologies, companies or business models
Thoughts on How:
Reduce rather than increase regulation — the recent TRAI regulations killed a few of the companies like MYToday that did not have a telco dependence, led to avalanche of service disruptions and exemptions for well-connected companies. This has scared off any remnant of investor capital in Mobile Value Added Services, pushing it to the largely unregulated ecommerce market (and making it even harder for companies that wish to provide information services to the masses over the phone). This clearly is an awful policy.
Encourage new technologies — the focus on regulating SMS and UssD is simply pushing people to smartphones, which frankly are far more capable to deliver rich, local-language, offline capable experiences than the dumb phones most targeted by most traditional MVAS companies.
Solve real, hard problems for new companies:
* Cash collection- enable at service to use Bangalore One kiosk for cash payments at a reasonable fee.
* Make “Know Your Customer” requirements and identity verification easier — UID, etc
Encourage cheaper citizen access to services — the bonanza of spectrum prices for government coffers has given India 3G networks that are absolutely more than the Common Man can afford. We need lower tariffs for 3G as well as free Wifi locations across the state.
Absolutely, do not proselytize specific technology solutions or platforms. I can think of no government technology platforms worldwide that are a hotbed of innovation compared to the Apple AppStore or Google Marketplace. The primary success metric must be customer adoption and unfortunately, these government technology platforms tend to have abysmal records in gaining such adoption.
Let the government — and its tech providers — provide API access to data and services — not the customer experiences. Encourage small players with new, untested business models and do not charge companies for usage of APIs until a given company makes over say 1,000,000 API requests per month.
Provide transparent incentives to mid to large websites that create mobile apps experiences in Kannada. E.g. If you have more than 20,000 monthly visitors in Karnataka according to Google analytics, you will receive Rs 10,000 if you translate your site into Kannada.
Provide the best APIs in the country and leverage this as a unique advantage of working and creating apps in Karnataka. -The state government already has access to the location in real-time of every phone for security purpose; what if a hackathon could be created from this anonymzed data to build better traffic patterns and study daily migrations?
Like a real start-up, start small, take steps to reduce risk BEFORE each successive investment, validate assumptions of citizen behavior and usage before expanding program, etc.
