Jio’s fight with other telcos to boost Digital India

NEWDELHI: Chairman of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani would have been delighted to see Jaisalmer’s tourist guide Sahil.

Taking advantage of Reliance Jio freebies, Sahil Khan has been using his mobile phone to further his business. He has made a short video of the city, which he uses to woo foreign travellers.

Before Jio came out with its offer, Sahil did not have more than ₹100 to spend on mobile bills with his business season running only during the four months of winter and spring.

The city draws a lot of French tourists making language a problem for the young guide. But Sahil now has the power of internet and the magic of Google Translate to help him. But the windfall is not going to last forever. The company has said it will start charging users a minimum of ₹149 after Jio’s free scheme ends on March 31.

By then, Ambani and his ilk hope that the market will change — more users will be hooked to the internet, and the average revenue per user will go up. During its launch, Ambani announced that calls will always be free on Jio, subscribers will only have to pay for internet irrespective of whether he uses it or not. And the biggest beneficiary of this is PM Narendra Modi’s Digital India campaign, which aims to spread internet literacy even in the remotest parts of the country. India adds 15,000 new internet users, everyday.

According to Kotak Institutional Equities, 61% of the telecom users in India spend less than ₹100 every month on mobile services, on an average – most of them do not use the internet.

That’s changing. Users spending less than ₹100 a month, now spend 9.8% of the money on data, though the larger 85.6% is spent on voice calls. Data usage in the country has quadrupled, from 300 MB to 1.2GB, in six months since Jio launched its free services on September 5 last year.

Cisco in its annual report in 2015 had predicted that spurred by mobile data usage, internet traffic will grow at 33% annually in India. “And 90% of this data usage is through mobile phones,” said Ajay Kumar, additional secretary in the department of electronics and IT. Understandably, telecom operators are in a spree to capture new data users by luring them with free and cheap internet packs.