India, Sept. 1 -- Ninety-three lakh subsidised GPU hours built the machine. Nobody has budgeted a rupee for the day it starts answering citizens

Cast your mind back to September 2016.

Data in India costs around '250 a gigabyte. Then Jio arrived, and within a year the price of a gigabyte had fallen by more than 90 per cent. Every sensible person predicted the same thing: our phone bills were about to collapse. They did not.

What collapsed was the price of a gigabyte. What happened to the bill was something else entirely. We stopped sending texts and started watching videos. Then we watched a video in high definition. Then we watched it on the train, in the kitchen, at the dinner table, all day. A country that had been among the world's ...