Just now read an article about France promising PC and network connection for a Euro a day. Well, lets see how the costs workout in India.
Typical rental charges for a decent PC is about Rs 1000 (Indian Rupees One Thousand) a month. I am talking about a PC with 512MB RAM and rest of the accessories. Basic Internet charges are about Rs 250 a month. There will be additional charges of Rs 100 a month, in the form of taxes etc. Combined together, one will get a decent internet connection (128kbps, 0.5G download, which is decent enough in this part of the world) for about Rs 1350 a month. Which amounts to about USD 30.00 a month or E25.00 a month. Close enough for what France promised, without any government intervention.
However, there is a lot in India you can buy with a Euro a day. For people with western food habits, one can by a Chicken McMaharaja at McDonalds for about a Euro. You can buy a couple of low cost, street-side lunches even in the costliest cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi. You can buy a week’s intake of vegetables etc. in most of the country.
Most of India’s internet access is taken care of not by home based PCs, but by the popular internet cafes. The prices start from about Rs 10 per hour (little less than a US Quarter and one fifth of a Euro.) Most of these cafes are scaled down versions of outfits like Kinko’s. They offer scanning, internet and laser printing services. For example, I haven’t owned a scanner for quite sometime. How do I scan something? I go to a nearby internet cafe (100 meters from my house) and get the document scanned, emailed to me, for about Rs 15.00. How many times do I scan things? May be once in about 2 months. So that comes with an annual cost of USD 2.0 :-). These outfits are mostly inhabited by students and job seekers, who may not want to invest in a home PC. Here for about a euro a day, you get 5 hours of network connectivity. Good enough for a browsing kind of use, but you may not have the notion of locally stored personal data.
Well, in summary, the cost of network access is very low in most of the urban India. There are some plans for making it much cheaper for rural India. But we may have to wait for a better infrastructure like decent electricity in rural India.