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by geodel 3607 days ago
With very low per capita income in India I think language issue is secondary. Even if customer service were better and native languages supported on internet based startups there would not be much opportunities or growth. To put things in perspective it is 5-7% of top income people who come under 'middle class' in India.

Startups in India are mostly rich kids hanging out with other rich kids and thinking wow seems like there are so many people like us who needs online commerce and services and so must be great business opportunity.

I agree customer service and infrastructure is in very bad shape but one thing many would not like to talk or admit is 95% of population is simply not in any state to pay even very little for better infrastructure. E.g Indians whine about poor telecom services while average revenue per user is like $2 per month. So it is quite unlikely to upgrade infrastructure / services to decent level.

Any infrastructure which once made available, accessible to all without price discrimination will remain in bad shape for very long time.

1 comments

"With very low per capita income in India I think language issue is secondary"

Flip that around for a while. If the language issue was made primary, you could literally speak any language and have access to quality education and higher-paying jobs.

Just read an article yesterday that said that 60 students were expelled from the IITs - one of the major reasons being that they could not cope with English as the medium of instruction: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/services/educat...

How would you make it primary? It would take a lot more resources to have services in multiple languages and resource are the big issue in first place.

From the article you linked:

> Apart from the language issue, the inability to apply knowledge to concepts is another reason why students fail.

I know it would be speculation but I think these kids were already below average when admitted.