9 highlights
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There are three Indias: India Unlimited, India Unconnected, and, in between those two, the India of 1.5 GB.
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The Unlimited Indian has a harder time understanding the 1.5 GB Indian — people with prepaid mobile internet plans that give them 1.5 GB data per day.
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The Unlimited Indian discovers she can’t get through to the domestic staff, who often turn off their mobile internet. They turn it on only when they need to use it. That’s how they make the 1.5 GB day last till midnight.
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Helpful videos in Indian languages, made by working class people looking to earn fame and dollars from YouTube, tell you to switch off auto-updates of apps, among other tricks to make your data last longer.
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They share pirated links on Telegram or other apps that let you know how many MBs a file is. (Apps that the Unlimited Indian hasn’t even heard of.)
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The 1.5 GB Indian was put to a severe stress test when life went under lockdown.
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What do you do when you have one phone and two children? You prioritise the male child, of course.
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The 1.5 GB Indian thus exits WhatsApp groups faster and knows a WhatsApp setting the unlimited Indian does not: turn off auto-download of media on WhatsApp.
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India has among the cheapest internet access in the world — but cheap for whom?