I was talking to one of my school mates during my last India visit in October. It was really a joyful moment when he discovered me talking to another mate, stopped his bicycle and came to greet me. I was probably talking him nearly after a decade after leaving high school where we studied together. Mischievously he asked me, “Sumit, do you still remember my name”? Though I forgot his good name (which I did not admit), I still remembered the nick name we used to call him teasingly (“Goltu” as he looks round face, short and well-built and whole body appears round). He was the same loving, caring, down-to-earth and impish guy as he used to be during school days.
As our conversation went on, we apologized to each other for not being in touch, he asked quirkily, “Are you in Orkut”?
“I have been in Orkut from its starting days in India, for nearly about for five years”, I said proudly being an IT graduate and with a feeling of knowing much more about it than him. To my astonishment, he suddenly removed his mobile phone from his pocket and asked me, “Tell me your ID, I’ll add you now in my friend list”.
Orkut, the social networking site from Google is the most popular in India so far with its 14 million registered user base. Facebook, the most popular social networking site in the world being behind in India with 8 million users is bullying fiercely.
We were in a small and sleepy town called Dharamgarh of the Kalahandi district which in the state, Orissa. The recent reports say that Orissa is the poorest state in India and Kalahandi is one of the most poorest and backward districts in the state. And here at the most backward place of the poorest state of the India, I was talking to my friend who finished the most basic technical education after class 10th (GCSE in UK) and works locally as an electrician with a wage of around $250 per month. It’s a decent wage to live happily at this place and my friend was glad too.
He pays around $3 extra to his mobile phone bill to access 3G internet services recently launched by the service provider, BSNL.
Currently, India is the 4th in the world (next to China, US and Japan) in terms of number of internet users with the numbers reaching 81 million. It’s only the 7% of the net population and in the last ten years the growth has been phenomenal 1500%. And the experts believe that in the coming years the growth would be at least 500%.
As it is world wide that the younger mass is more active in social networking sites and more than 50% of the Indian internet users are of the age group 18-35, 14 million Orkut users are obvious. One of my cousins, aged 18 who joined Orkut less than a year back has more scraps than me. Now-a-days it makes me feel that in rural areas people first get to know about (or heard about) social networking sites like Orkut and then become an Internet literate. Every other day I get Orkut friend request from people in the same age group from my place (of course from the same Dharamgarh area) and I don’t get surprise how it is all happening. Nearly a year back the same service provider, BSNL launched broadband internet service in the same area with a monthly bill of $6 (if I remember correctly, as it has been a year since I investigated) for the basic connection.
I had never accessed internet in a mobile phone before. And as my friend was enthusiastically teaching me how to access internet (Orkut of courseJ) from his mobile phone, my mind was busy telling me, “The time has come”.
Nice Blog guru...
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