Reliance Jio is now Bharath East India Company. Why is there so much frenzy for investing in Reliance Jio despite the pandemic? If you don’t know your history, you are bound to repeat it once again.
India was commanding 24 percent of the world’s GDP in the year 1750, that was when the Dutch East India Company which was established on March 20, 1602, to trade with Moghul India, and the British East India Company, incorporated by royal charter on December 31, 1600, to trade with East, Southeast Asia and India entered India for the sake of business by influencing the KingsA And later we all know what happened.
Historian William Dalrymple writes in his introduction to The Anarchy, the East India Company was,” the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok,” loot is what the Company did to India for 250 years.
By the time of Independence in 1947, India’s share in the World GDP fell to 4 percent. Despite making India a poor country, the total wealth that went out of India in those 200 yrs was estimated as 30 crore crores ( Our Annual National Budget is 20 lakh crores)
India has recovered economically and has become a big consumer market. The gateway for that consumer market is Jio, at the cost of your neighborhood grocery shop, neighborhood kirana shop, neighborhood milk parlor, neighborhood medical store. All these people will lose their livelihoods, and their families will be on the road. The livelihood of millions of families is robbed, for-profits of the Corporates and the profits from our hard-earned money are shared with the Foreign Companies.
It is human psychology to go for free and whatever is cheaper. First Jio was offered free, then nominal rates, and now you have to pay the price they command because they have killed competitors and the companies left Airtel, and the Idea-Vodafone which are struggling to sustain. you are left with no choice. In the US or in Europe, with very strict Anti-Trust laws this would have been illegal.
The two biggest markets for the future are Retail and Data. You can imagine what is going to happen if there is a monopoly in these two areas. Windfall profits, hence the frenzy. No Diversity, No Democracy. You are slowly losing your Independence because you don’t know your history properly and this time it is Bharath East India Company.
Dr Raghava Gundavarapu
(Dr Raghava Gundavarup is a practicing physician from Ongole, Andhra Pradesh)
