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Showing posts from October, 2014

What will Microsoft India cloud do for India and Indians

This article was published in Information Week India on 10th October and is reproduced in this blog. India is poised for a digital revolution. With a government pushing digital services, and a huge focus on on empowering every citizen with an identity card, a bank account, insurance and a digital interface, the future is bright for IT in India. With the announcement of opening local data centers in India by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, Microsoft is well placed to explore the huge opportunities that will be unfolded in the days to come.  The Microsoft India cloud proposes to begin with three data centers and will provide the world's best cloud computing that India needs so desperately to handle the large volume of digital transactions,  need to cut down costs and handle the data that will be generated by digitally enabling a billion Indian citizens. Additionally, Microsoft will be able to offer their cloud services in a number of Indian languages, thus eliminating the need for

Banking the Unbanked In India

India's biggest challenge has been to empower its citizens with financial inclusion by providing banking to its unbanked population to Banking. The government's initiative of opening 15 million accounts in one day sets the tone to make sure that every adult citizen has a bank account in India.  Critics say it cannot be done, but we know from history that carpet bombing is the best way to overcome a challenge. The Indians have set out to a economic transformation in their country, by empowering its unbanked citizens the menace of cash in the system can be overcome thus improving the GDP of India. It is estimated that the cash economy in India is bigger than the legal economy in India, the cash in this system is known as black money in India and has strong parallel network for banking in cash. If you use a credit or debit card with an Indian merchant he will charge you about 2% to 3% extra as the transaction fee for using the card, this encourages customers to pay in cas