In about three months, a little-known company called Novatium plans to offer a stripped-down home computer for about $70 or $75. That is about half the price of the standard “thin clients” of this kind now sold in India, made possible in part by some novel engineering choices.
Computer for 75-100 dollars is nice. Being an Indian myself I know that you have got to read between the lines. How fat would be the computer, how many people would be buying it. The quality, India is not the US where the customer is always right. Considering the fact that not many people in India make over 100 dollars a month things are still very expensive.
Broadband is becoming popular in India, the only problem being the speed are too low so you cannot really call it broadband and there is restriction to how much you can download. I myself have a braodband connection with a monthly download limit of 5GB it costs me about 1800 rupees per month which is a lot for a limited 5gb 512 kbps connection. I spend almost 20% of my salary on acquiring low quality Internet service.
Developing countries fail to provide their citizens with basic amenties and to take our focus of the real issues brainwash us with patriotic ideas.
A 100 usd computer? Heh.. I doubt it’ll be very well built..
There have been so many announcements of ultra-cheap computers that I have become very careful. Nice announcement, but no applause until it really ships.
“I spend almost 20% of my salary on acquiring low quality Internet service.”
How can you afford to spend 20% of your income on Internet?
I spend about 20% of my income on my car: car payment, car insurance, and gas. I drive around 2500 miles / month. I consider that too be pretty expensive and I have thought about switching to a more affordable car.
If I had to spend 20% of my income on the Internet, I would not have an Internet connection at home. I couldn’t pay for it because I need my income for other stuff. My non restricted Internet service costs me 0.35% of my income.
I looked it up and 1800 rupees is equal to $41. That is pretty expensive for limited Internet service, but what’s shocking is that somehow you pay for it even though it’s 20% of your monthly income. This means your monthly income is somewhere around $200.
What that means is that the other things you need in life must be relatively cheap compared to USA prices. The $160 you’re left with after paying for Internet, somehow pays rent and food, which are the two most important things. $160 pays for about one week of food for me. Rent is around $800 for the cheapest one bedroom apartments around here.
$160 pays for about one week of food for me. Rent is around $800 for the cheapest one bedroom apartments around here.
well on the other hand i’ve lived on 80 (occasionally less) bucks a month for food, it’s not great but it’s possible to live worse. housing i’ve never known less than 200 a month after utilies but then that was with out any extra people living on a couch in the front room. shit that was in a town of 30,000. i suspect it’s entirely possible to live off 160 a month especially in india, wouldn’t want to but you could.
Its a completely different thinking and you almost need to visit india to Understand, but contrary to popular belief, the money in India actually has much better value compared to westerm countries.
In the US/Canada, a coffee costs around a dollar (roughly 50 ruppees)
In India, a coffee costs a ruppee.
The same principle applies for milk, food, rent and the such. For less than two to three dollars, you can have a really really good meal in most places.
The rent is pretty much the same. Just make sure to put the currency in ruppees. You can get a nice place for 800 – 1000 ruppees in the city.
Quite honestly, if it werent for foreign goods coming in, and bringing the money value down, things would be just fine here. But that’s another big issue to talk of.
PS: I am an indian as well.
Most of people get around $200 in India that’s why so many
MNCs outsource their work to India.
yea i has a coworker that used to live in india and he said him and his wife and four kids got by alright on around $60 a week but he came here with a few friends and worked one FT job and one PT job and sent home twice as much living here sharing a apt with a few other indians…
of course now it has to be ironic huh….
To me it sounds like the exchange rate is flawed. Based on the prices above 1 ruppee is worth a whole lot more than 0.023 dollars.
“Its a completely different thinking and you almost need to visit india to Understand”
I might just have to do that. If I can get good Indian food for 2-3 dollars like you said, I might even make back the price of the plane ticket by saving on food. 🙂
haha… that’s funny.
Make sure you don’t go too spicy though. Not many foreigners can adjust with authentic indian food. We dont want to spend all our savings at a couple of nights in the hospital *smiles*
But, Of course, You are more than welcome to visit. I live in Canada myself, so I’ll bestow the honor of welcoming you to those who live there still
yea, if they offer you a dish with allspice in india – tread carefully because it is not the same as in the US
also applies to some other spices if i remember correctly
You never were much abroad, were you? The exchange rates and wat you get for the money are two issues. Travelling to India was really an experience. After returning to Germany I understood many things better.
A good rule of thumb is to multiply the $ cost by a factor between 8 and 10, to get the equivalent “cost” of some item in India. Thus a loaf of bread costing $1.50 here costs around 12 to 15 rupees there. This figure is, of course, lower than the official exchange rate of about $1=Rs 44.
Looking at things another way: an engineer earning Rs 40,000 per month in India earns an amount equivalent to roughly $5000 in the US.
The only thing that India has in an amount far in excess of what we have here is its stinking, corrupt, local governments. The original poster alluded to that.
p.s. I was born in India
You forget that the difference in price of a decent stardard of living between Germany and and the US is much less than the US and India (first world vs. third world)
Of course, as India opens herself up, a flood of foreign goods come in which causes rapid inflation.
Globalism is a b!tch both ways.
The exchange rate isn’t normalized against things like food and rent. Even though few currencies today are still backed by gold and silver, the easiest way to understand the exchange rate is to still think of it as “50 rupees buys $1 worth of gold”.
To get a better idea of how much stuff costs in a given country, compare the country’s GDP/capita with its PPP/capita. Purchasing power parity (PPP) is a measure that tries to represent the wealth of an economy in terms of equivalent buying power. It does this by factoring into account the cost of food, housing, etc. India’s per-capita GDP is $500 dollars. That means the average Indian would be able to buy $500 of gold in one year. In comparison, its per-capita PPP is $2500. That means the average Indian would be able to buy food, housing, etc, that would cost $2500 a year in the US.
during the three years [ 93-96 ] i was studying for my diploma [ pre undergraduate] in india , i used to spend about 700 rupees a month on everything including rent, food and travel , movies etc. ; and i used to buy some used books etc too!!
during the three years of undergrad [ 97-2000 ] about 100o rupees a month!! and i lived in cities all that time ;
i never owned a car till five months ago when it became compulsory!! ; most people in india use public transport or two wheelers ;
when i told these to my friends and students here, they are shocked!! i think now adays students can still manage to live comfortably in Rs1500/- a month;
but most students dont work while studying. i had to . some of my friends did too. but most dont; now adays that is changing, last time i went to india i saw a lot of students working parttime in super markets and standing the booths in the malls ;
one guy said he has to work to pay for college!! same story as here
i guess we had it good when we studied ;
oh and about PPP, gas prices are about the same in india an d here;
cheers
ram
Can I run a Linux cluster on 10 such machines??
I went to pricewatch.com and tried to build the cheapest possible pc, heres what i got
$20 – 10gb hd
$78- motherboard/ram/cpu combo – 128mb pc2100 ram, 1.6ghz duron
$23 – case
$10 – power supply
$10 – video card
$55 – 17in monitor
$5 – keyboard
$3 – mouse
$0 – Linux
————-
$204
Now sure, it’s no $100 pc. But that include shipping for all of those pieces, and vendor mark-up. I think without those it’d be pretty easy to make a $100 pc.
I remember at one time the exchange rate was about 1$ = 25 Rupees. That was fair but now it is rediculous Let us see here
Hair Cut in India = 15 Rupees at best of places whereas haircut here is $18 after tip. so technically $<Rupees
Doctors visit for a regular visit 80 Rupees, in US about 80$80 if you take out insulrance. here 1$ = 1 Rs.
Get a massage 20 Rupees for 1 hour ( Free with haircut) in US $60 for an hour. $ < Rupees.
However once you go to things like electronics and cars the whole thing changes
Microwave – 40$ in Walmart in India cheapest Microwave is about Rs15000
Cars lowest cost for a new car is $7000 for Hyndai in US. Buy the same in india about Rs 450,000
And so on and so forth, and the bottom line is people who come to States at the end of the day want to spend their US earned money in India to get a better return.
Oh by the way guys interested in interest rates we get about 4-5% interest in our savings bank.
Also there is a govt run savings plan that doubles your money in 7-8 years.
This has been a very interesting discussion for osnews. 🙂
The $40 Microwave is still pretty crazy sounding. I’m not sure how anyone can make a microwave that cheap and still make profit on it. I’ve seen them as low as $30 actually at Best Buy.
20% of your salary on the Internet???? I spend just 500 [10$] for broadband in India…
However once you go to things like electronics and cars the whole thing changes
Microwave – 40$ in Walmart in India cheapest Microwave is about Rs15000
Cars lowest cost for a new car is $7000 for Hyndai in US. Buy the same in india about Rs 450,000
That is because of the customs and duties and stuff
(
The cost of electicity is pretty high, and we pay almost a dollar per litre for gas, about haircut if you go to a decent place it would cost you way more than 18 rupees. I don’t know if you have been to the USor not but hair cutting saloons there are way cleaner than ours, ours are a health hazard. Microwave ovens in India are way more expensive too compared with US almost all the etrmoics equipement for that matter is. Food in general is inwxpensive, if you eat what food eats. For non- vegetarians things are expensive. My country right or wrong is the motto most of the Indians live by.
Ankit there is a world beyond India you spend 500 rupees on internet which is not even qualified to be called broadband. Limits on downloads and speed is all we get in India in the name of Internet and phone calls. Being patriotic about everything is being senseless. In US for 35 dollars you can buy boradband connection with a speed of 2 mbps atleast with unlimited download limit. So that does not compare, plus we earn in rupess that makes it even worse. Each time I use the phone or buy gas I am being patriotic by paying more that the rest of the world. I don’t think you make 4000 dollars a month in India, look at the cost of computers here , we pay in dollars for the equipment and earn in rupees. If I want to buy a decent graphics card I would be paying more than double the cost of what a customer in US would be paying. For example Nvidia 6800 GT would cost around 400- to a max 500 dollars in the US, but in India I would have to pay 48000 rupees which is more than a thousand dollars (something like 1100 dollars). I can give a whole list here. India provides us services which are only good on paper, when it comes to execution it sucks.
This last post by Vikram Sharma puts things in perspective better. I was born in Hungary, and now I live in the United States. The basic needs of people are a little cheaper in Hungary than in the US, but I went back there around one year ago to find out just how much cheaper it really is. I found that if you want the same exact stuff, and I mean the same quality as in the United States, than things are either the same or more expensive. If I wanted the same standard of living in Hungary, I would have to make the same amount of money I made here in the United States.
My guess is that this is true for India as well.
“Hair cutting saloons”? 🙂 Thanks, that gave me a good laugh!