The stupidity of India’s carbon policy

India recently re-affirmed it’s stance on climate change when external affairs minister S M Krishna addressed a round table at the climate change summit organized by the UN. The minister said that India’s carbon emissions will never exceed that of the developed countries in per-capita terms. He also slammed the west for leading “unsustainable lifestyles” that caused the problem.1

In simple terms, India’s stance is “climate change? Ain’t my problem!”.

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  1. India asks developed nations to change their lifestyle, Business Standard, Thursday, Sep 24, 2009 []

Is Telecom Infrastructure?

How do you make money in power, transport and other such “infrastructure” industries? Most likely, by doing what you have to do most efficiently (i.e., at lowest cost).

The case I am interested in is that of telecom industry. Telecom industry is seeing commoditization of its services. Broadband connections, for example, compete on price per bytes moved. Only the most efficient bit-movers would win such a game. Voice operators compete on price per minute. While this seems a little more flexible than the price per byte owing to the fact that bytes required to carry a minute of voice may vary on quality of service and compression, it seems unlikely that operators aren’t already on efficient horizon in these technical aspects. Only mobile-VAS services seem to escape this price-per-unit of bandwidth paradigm. Mobile VAS in India has so far been a small percentage of operators’ revenues.

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