This is a bizarre article in the flavor of NY Times India coverage which cannot look at India except through the lens of cow, caste and curry. After all how cou

This is a bizarre article in the flavor of NY Times India coverage which cannot look at India except through the lens of cow, caste and curry. After all how could a third world entrepreneur build the biggest data network in the world for the cheapest price? Not once but twice! One instance of how the article is riddled with errors: "From 1980 to 1985, the number of equity investors in India rose from 1m to 5m, and by 1985 1 million of them owned shares of Reliance. Since equity investors are likely to be middle class and above, this gave Reliance a broader political constituency: instead of buying individual regulators with bribes, they nudged the electorate with dividends." As per [1] 240 million people cast votes in the 1985 election. So with 0.25% of the total vote scattered across hundreds of constituencies Reliance was able to swing the electorate which is fractured across die-hard political affiliations, economic interests, religions and caste hierarchies. Sure whatever. Perhaps it is hard for the author to admit that Mukesh Ambani, the current CEO of Relaince/Jio and son of the founder, is a unparalleled operational genius. He singlehandedly led the team that rolled out the biggest refinery in the world in Gujurat in 1999 [2] where "biggest in the world" and India never went together for anything manufactured. He also rolled out Reliance Communications in the 1990s which was then the cheapest mobile provider by an order of magnitude [3]. That business went to his brother Anil in the family split in 2006 and Anil ran it into the ground. When their fraternal non-complete expired Mukesh built out Jio which again dropped data pricing by an order of magnitude and made voice free. Jio now has the cheapest data in the world [4]. This bankrupted all his competitors who were centi-billion market cap companies and forced them to drop prices and merge. It also bought hundreds of millions of extremely poor Indians to feature phone ownership for the first time. They had the opportunity to what he did but could not. They also wielded the same power with the bureaucracy that he did but were not able to leverage it. I certainly would like 12GB of data $1.23. Heck, even 10x that is a bargain. But instead of pondering what he did the author spins dark tales of subterfuge, mafia, corruption and bribes. Eye-roll [1] https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country-view/146/40 https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country-view/146/40 [2] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jamnagar-oil-refinery/ https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jamnagar-oil-refinery/ [3] https://www.rediff.com/money/2002/dec/27ril1.htm https://www.rediff.com/money/2002/dec/27ril1.htm [4] https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/ https://www.cable.co.uk/mobiles/worldwide-data-pricing/