It’s a line you hear repeated so often, it’s practically become background noise: India boasts the cheapest mobile data on earth. You can almost picture officials rehearsing it—that snappy $0.17 per gigabyte figure. It’s their trump card, the gleaming symbol they hold up to the world as proof that a modern, digital superpower has truly arrived on the stage. It’s a terribly effective piece of marketing, one must admit.

The only snag is that, for a vast swathe of the Indian population, it is a cruel fiction.

When you stop measuring in absolute cents and start measuring affordability against what people actually earn, the entire narrative collapses. That cheap data is, in fact, costlier for an Indian citizen than for their counterparts in Britain, France, Spain, and even China. In a nation where millions subsist on what amounts to a few quid a day, even the most basic digital access becomes a........

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