IRCTC charges flat Rs 10 on each ticket as their service charge. But why? Cards payment industry has a painful clause that merchants has to bear any fraud. For example, if a fraudster books a ticket with stolen card and later the card owner files a chargeback, IRCTC has to pay the amount back. But the fraudster has finished enjoying travel before owner files a chargeback! So how to does they deal with this? IRCTC decided (like what other merchants do) to take this from consumers as an insurance money. And that’s how an honest poor Indian suffers!

Let’s get back to the business of this post. Apart for typical IRCTC charges, the consumer has to beer additional bank charges too. Refer the list of transaction service fees charged by various banks at IRCTC. All credit card payment gateways charge 1.65-1.8% of transaction amount, Debit cards are charged at flat Rs 10 while net-banking transactions are charged a little more (Rs 10 + Service Tax).

If you want to save a few bucks while booking small tickets (up to Rs 600) use credit cards and debit cards if they are enabled. ICICI has enabled use of Visa debit-cards at credit-card gateways. I typically select Axis PG and use ICICI debit card. As a result I pay Rs 10 + 1.65% additionally.

- ankit

(for vsnlproxy. as of 25 April,2010)

It means at IITK people download videos at an average speed of 5.3 kilo kbps. People here enjoy the best internet/networking infrastructure in UP (or probably in India too). The average speed is almost 10 times better than what an average Indian gets. If you see carefully, the average for Kanpur is pulled up 3 times compared to rest of India and UP. Why? I think it’s just because of IITK!

Note: The data for bsnlproxy is too different. Seems like using vsnlproxy downloads videos much faster.

- ankit

1. Install User Agent Switcher addon in Firefox
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Options Menu > Default User Agent. Select iPhone 3.0
4. Log on to https://m.google.com/app/buzz

and you are there… Happy Buzzing!

Lets see where do we stand in the massive Web of Internet. There are total 3,109,827,840 IPv4 addresses issued worldwide. India owns merely 0.6% (19,267,224) of them. We hold world’s 17.6% population and only 0.6% of internet is hosted/used inside India! On the other side, with 19% of world’s population China has 7.2% of IPv4 addresses becoming the third after USA (48%), UK (8%).

You may argue that I should have measured by # of Internet users, but there are not exact figures to support it. Some agencies say 40M Indians have touched Internet while other say 80M. Whatever, I feel # of IP addresses gives pretty accurate measure of a country’s Web presence (web-servers hosted) as well as usage (ISPs).

India comes at 15th in owning total 0.51% of all ccTLDs. China is at 5th with 3.36% of all ccTLDs (after US – 64%, Germany – 5%, UK – 3.7% and Canada – 3.6%). Where is the awareness for country specific domain names? Why are we still running for .com?

There is big gap between no of people who use internet vs no of people who know there is a Internet. Obviously, education is a must to get into this. But not everyone can get English education. The Internet has accepted, they cannot bring the whole world in one language, then why do we want to push English? I am sure there are 100 times more pages in Chinese than a total of Hindi/Marathi/Punjabi/Gujarati/Tamil/etc in Google index.

Apart from cheaper equipment and tariff, the other factor behind mobile revolution in India is the support for local languages (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Punjabi, etc;) in handsets. We need the same for Internet. Not everyone can speak and understand English. Even ICANN has accepted this after a long time. Why IRCTC is not available in Hindi? Why Indian social networks like Bharatstudent.com, Bigadda.com, Hi5.com are not available in regional languages. There Wikipedia, BBC, Facebook & Orkut are available in Indian regional languages and gaining popularity. Why not Linux community provides free OS in Hindi? Besides, there is a Hindi keyboard layout, tools available for easy typing in Hindi/Gujarati/Tamil. And thanks to Google for Transliteration.

I am waiting for a day when our government shall issue a law/guidelines for website owners for enabling Internet for disabled people. I am waiting for a day when an Indian web-hosting giant opens up a data center in US/UK (for cost cutting bcoz their cooler climate and cheaper bandwidth) instead of collaborating with existing foreign providers. Today preliminary knowledge is almost free over Internet. I am waiting for a day when every member of our society has access to such information free and a child does not necessarily need to buy a book. I am waiting for a day when free internet kiosks will be available roadside and we can access Wikipedia, maps/routes and information will be a hand apart for the poorest guy in my country.

- Ankit

Ref:
* Country wise IP count as of 2009-12-19
* ICANN Wiki and Country-wise Total Domains Data as of 2009-12-14
* Second source for IP stats http://www.ip2location.com/ip2location-internet-ip-address-2010-report.aspx . Here too India is at 19th, and China at 3rd.

Thanks Vineet !

“computing industry is the only industry more fashion driven than woman’s fashion“

Of course, this is true. Think about the last 10 years, how many new languages introduced, how many new versions of existing languages, new frameworks are released everyday, etc; But what about the compatibility with old? Isn’t today we (as a system owner, who actually pays for software development) want to have a stable, low cost, maintenance free software. I want to install it once and be assured for rest of 5-10 years. New versions/frameworks comes with new bugs. Do you have a stable CRM/ERP that can help me in 5-10 years run?