Why tech giants are offering premium AI tools to millions of Indians for free https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14pr0enjr6o Nikita Yadav such offers are calculated investments...India has over 900 million internet users and offers some of the world's cheapest data. Its online population is young - most internet users are under the age of 24, belonging to a generation that lives, works and socialises online, using smartphones.
Bundling these AI tools with data packs creates a massive opportunity for tech companies given India's data consumption outpaces much of the world. The more Indians use these platforms, the more first-hand data companies can access.
- "Most users have always been willing to give up data for convenience or something free and that will continue,.. But this is where the government will have to step in. "Regulation will need to increase as authorities figure out how to manage the broader issue of people giving away their data so freely," says Mr Roy.
Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP) 2023 around digital media and privacy, is yet to be enacted...while the act introduces broad protections around personal data, its implementation rules are still pending and it does not yet address AI systems or algorithmic accountability.
From 'Anandamath' to the present, Vande Mataram reflects how a song born in devotion and marked by early exclusion has journeyed from hymn to ideology, revealing the uneasy link between faith and belonging in the making of the nation.
by Sreejith K.
07/11/2025
From Zohran Mamdani, Nehru and the forgotten thread of freedom https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pratap-bhanu-mehta-writes-from-zohran-mamdani-nehru-and-the-forgotten-thread-of-freedom-10350358/ the working class — not the privileged elite — that heralded a genuinely open and cosmopolitan society. In contemporary parlance, one might say that the cosmopolitanism of the city is the cosmopolitanism of labour, not of capital... The ideological thread connecting these figures( Debs/Baldwin & Nehru) belonged to a historical moment we have largely forgotten — when civil liberties, anti-racism, socialism, open societies, and decolonisation were all considered part of a single emancipatory movement. Freedom and justice were indivisible...
Civil liberties, in this view, were a cause of the Left — distinguishing it from communism and far removed from today’s libertarian appropriation. What is so resonant about this connection is the reminder that civil liberties once meant defending even the rights of those accused of conscientious objection and treason. In an age when the definition of treason has expanded to the point that the very idea of a “political prisoner” has lost meaning, this history bears remembering.