The Empire is srikes back

India’s moving .
Three news articles in the Times of India last week set me thinking .
The Dept of posts has moved courts to legislate a law banning private courier companies from transporting packets weighing lower than 500 gms which is sixty percent of the courier business and could in effect wipe out the private courier market .
The postal department has been fighting a losing battle with email which has truly dropped the mail business dramatically . Around ten years back , I wrote my last letter in longhand and its been ages since I put pen to paper to communicate a message . Email rules our lives now , thanks to Sabeer Bhatia who’s hotmail changed things forever . There’s no revenue model yet , but the concept of free email generating millions of users got Bill Gates charges enough to buy Hotmail for four hundred million dollars and send Bhatia into retirement at the age of twenty nine . In this one masterstroke , suddenly , the world was a different place . It also created a flatter world , something that Thomas Friedman woke upto very late . Information , the key ingredient of all decisions was suddenly available to boss and employee alike and also students and teachers alike . Email exploded communication many fold , besides sounding the death knell to industries like greeting cards , stationary , photocopying machines and of late the telephone booth . You can transfer a file using the pen drive , you can host information websites , you can publish your book using blogspot , you can email photographs , files worth gigabytes across miles of space . Why go to the post office ? Prompting the department of posts to first play along by seeking to be a large mail order company supporting the internet infrastructure requirement of delivering products bought online and having failed in generating any ecommerce delivery revenues, to now examine a law that stops the competing courier companies from delivering light documents . Will it win the war in an increasingly irreversible economy .Time will tell .
Why go to a bank ? Last time I visited a bank was five years ago . Today I get all my transactions done virtually , buy and sell stock , send money transfers , create demand drafts , track my investments online . Life has changed . I had fumed at a manager of the unjab national bank manager in late 1991 when he took a long time to clear my withdrawl slip for cash withdrawing while taking a long time to open a new account for a young girl . Why does it take such a long time , I wondered for me to withdraw my money from my bank ? Citibank changed that with the Any Time Machine . My money is mine anytime I want without having to ask anyone . In one stroke , banking separated the men from the boys . Parallely , down Dalal Street , paperless trading knocked out the stock exchange thrill of seeing hectic trading across counters reaching feverish proportions , making the private sector electronic banking systems richer by making available to them portfolios of the rich and the famous . State owned banks missed out on this large profitable opportunity big time . In response to the attempts of private banks to move in and takeover government banks , the largest Indian bank , the monolithic State Bank of India , finally responded after five years of being in the sidelines watching India go capitalist . The mother of all banks has now embarked on an image correction spree with a fantastic advertising campaign . Which bank has more customers than the entire continent of Australia ? Which bank has an asset base larger than three next-in-line- banks ? Our home loans are transparent . There’s a television commercial that has a girl losing a bet on how the bank can give loans without a guarantor . There’s another that has a guy who gets to make rotis on losing a bet about a home loan from State bank of India . The elephant has moved and how .
Railways have turned a neat profit . rollon-rolloff , khullars , upgrades , increasing capacity revolutionary . In the batch of thirty people attending this years Dynamic Pricing class in Indian institute of Management , Ahmedabad , over thirteen were from the Indian railways . Television channels were abuzz with the news that two couples had been upgraded by the Railways from their second class compartments to air-conditioned class due to the new dynamic pricing policy . This one change is pretty unheard of in Indian railway history . Also , some waitlisted people were called up and confirmed seats in first class , thereby utilizing the available empty inventory in the first class . The headline in the Economic times of today , the 23rd nov blares the audacious discounts being offered for passengers to upgrade . An unheard of concept in sloppy , sleepy Indian railways – the differential pricing principle . Different rates for different folks . Peak season surcharges , lean season discounts . Hitting out at the private airlines with these strategies , the Indian railways is gaining ground , slowly and surely .
Another railway concept , RORO or Roll-on-roll-off is the new buzz amongst transporters . To fight the impeding loss of revenue due to the fantastic infrastructure created by the ministry of roads , wherein transporters were finding it better to transport on the roads with renewed vigour rather than using railways . The fully loaded trucks have to just roll onto the railway wagons and roll off at the destinations . Saving fuel bills and maintainence costs encourages the truck owners to use the railways now . The empire is striking back .
The other news piece was curiosier . You can no longer swin with the fish and stay alive . Akbarally’s , one of the larger departmental stores in Mumbai , known for decades as the final stop for shopping for a whole range of products , closed their Santacruz branch down . The reason – bigger and better malls all around . Is this sounding the death knell for mom-and-pop stores all around the country ? The employees , all of whom were unskilled labour didn’t have an inkling of something like this coming their way and therefore were shocked out of their wits when the owner sealed the store and walked away . The most the employees could do was stage a demonstration against not being informed . The formidable competitor was Big bazaar , whole mega mall in Lower Parel recently shut just an hour after opening as the number of customers swelled to uncontrollable proportions . The cops were worried of a stampede . The Mall extended its sale to over three days though it was touted as just a republic Day sale for just a day .
Thirteen kilometers away , one of the oldest theatres in Mumbai , Minerva is shutting shop .The owner , recalled sadly how it was a theatre that created many a blockbuster and he counted out the number of silver jubilees over the years in his interview to the television channel . Sadly , he has to close down next week . The economics doesn’t work anymore for his movies shows priced at twenty rupees . The audience is now used to swanky theatres with great reclining seats with large leg space , dolby surround sound , fifty rupee popcorn and a brilliant experience . It’s neighbour , the magnificient Metro cinema closed last year and is now being renovated to be a multiplex . Noone wants to see a movie here now . It’s the same state of affairs as in the Plaza theatre in Bangalore . Spankling new multiplexes would take its places . The prices of tickets would be five times the prices currently though the multiplex enjoys a tax holiday .
The maths is simple .
Six hundred tickets in the old style theatre would get it eighteen thousand rupees , adding upto seventytwo thousand over a day , while a multiplex with a four hundred seats at hundred bucks a seat adds to forty thousand a show or half a million rupees a day for its eleven shows a day . The multiplex follows a different logic . Instead of the standard four movie format in a day the multiplex logic of a movie within any half hour of you coming to the theatre works wonderfully well as people run between their new economy schedules to catch movies . Most of the new multiplex companies have publicly listed companies making enough and more money from the entertainment boom .
The Economic Times had another article today . Long distance calls cost will be priced at one rupee with the one tariff plan announced by the government last week , creating havoc in the telecom circles .Indian was the only country in the world where the number of cable television connections were larger then the number of the telephone connections which were larger than the number of cellphone connections . This was in 2002 . Three years later , we face a very different reality . There are over seventy million cellphones , around sixty million cable television connections and a fifty five million telephone connections . The world has spun around full circle . People had started surrendering their land line phones back , and with this one rupee-a-long-distance-call masterstroke , the government wants to get the landline , fixed telephony up and running again. One rupee long distance calls will change the telephony industry suddenly . What happens to all the STD booths across the country that all of us used to frequent . The kind of employment created by the last surge in connectivity due to the STD booths ten years back will be put on the block now as people move from coming to STD booths to make a call to using their cellphones for calls . They have uncertain futures , while the nation looks to a great well-connected future . How will they reinvent themselves as each member in each family has a cellphone connection , guaranteeing them instant connectivity anywhere ?
Old jungle saying , ‘some questions don’t have answers .’

India is changing , and how .