Is India getting digitally isolated?

Is India getting digitally isolated?

  1. I can’t buy a global product (right from hosting services to services like chatGPT+) from India.
  2. I can’t subscribe to a global digital product (like my fav newsletters) as my India based credit card is rejected by the payment services.
  3. India based subscribers to my newsletter (AtomicIdeas) cannot purchase a subscription, because my newsletter host, i.e. Substack uses Stripe integration (which is pretty much a standard for global payment businesses, especially subscription).

I understand that India is now going global with UPI (i.e Indian citizens can use UPI in a few countries like Singapore), but aren’t we isolating ourselves from experiencing global products and services? After all, not every business will setup a local entity / change its workflow.

Think about it: You can't buy ChatGPT+ subscription from India while your competitor from Singapore is going to scale up fast using that. Who is losing out in the long run?

Update: OpenAI just launched for India, but the big question remains: Why do they have to do anything specific for India? They have the muscle power and resources to do, but what about the rest of the world?

In the long run, won't this (badly) impact our (global) competitive advantage as a nation?

Are we trying to become a closed-door economy like China, without the Chinese leverage?

Vinit Bhansali

Seed stage investor in Indian Tech Startups

2 年

Quick Q: Did ChatGPT have to solve for Indian regulations to launch? If so, others can as well. I used to feel like you did, Ashish. But then when I spoke to some non-techies in tier 2/3 I realised that the pain point of being unable to cancel subscription there is much much much larger than the pain point of us techies to get workarounds done.

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