Free Basics: Nandan Nilekani believes India can come up with better free internet schemes

As of now there are those who hate the idea of Facebook’s Free Basics and those who do stand for it. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is fed up of the comments as well. It recently asked all those who were supporting Facebook’s Free Basics to be specific and not go with set template that social network has been automating for its users to support its initiative. But now there seems to be other ideas emanating from the whole Free Basics discussion. Nandan Nilekani, Indian entrepreneur, bureaucrat and politician, is now the newest to oppose the Facebook Free Basics campaign. And he doesn’t just stop at complaints, but provides some valuable solutions as well. In a recent post  in the Times of India blog, Nilekani pointed out a simpler and leaner idea that will not just get a few million on board the internet, but give them the freedom to choose what they want to access. The idea works perfectly with the net neutrality debate and according to his calculation, will benefit the millions who are currently offline and at the end of it all keep everyone including the Government happy. Penned down in his article along with Viral Shah, the gent claims that his idea is " based on the success of LPG DBT or Pahal, where over 100 million families receive LPG subsidy in their bank accounts.". He went on to explain how the government could offer a similar Data Pack Direct Benefit Transfer(DBT) scheme wherein that offers 120MB of data annually to every subscriber with the first 10MB free every month. He goes on to show that how it makes every bit of sense as well, “Even with all existing 400 million data users plus 400 million new data users being offered a free Data Pack DBT, the cost to the government would be 30/user x 800 million users = 2,400 crore a year. People may buy multiple SIMs for free data, but this problem is easily solved by linking mobile numbers to Aadhaar numbers (now held by 950 million people) so that one person can get access to only one Data Pack DBT.” A fool-proof plan indeed, but certainly sounds a lot better than what Facebook is rooting for. Clearly, the biggest problem with Free Basics is not what its up to, but what it disguises in its promotions that seems to be annoying everyone. That would essentially be a closed internet with plenty of filters and boundaries. Indeed, everybody needs to read between the lines before they stand for or against it.