BulkSMS have been disabled till Wednesday(29th September, 2010).
The government of India has imposed a ban on all bulk SMS (text
messages) and MMS (picture or video messages) under an effort to avoid
religious riots in the country as a court ruling on a controversial
religious site issue is expected to come out.
The ban is a daring step for the government of a progressive democracy
and has been imposed as text messages could be used to mobilize large
number of people for rioting or violent protests.
The Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology had
announced the ban on Wednesday for a period of 72 hours. However,
statements on the country's Press Information Bureau website said that
the ban has been extended until September 30. The ban does not include
one to one text message between two mobile phones.
The ban has been affecting various social networks based on SMS text
messages like GupShup, and a number of mobile-based businesses.
GupShup has more than 35 million users in a country and it uses the
text messages to connect its members. These firms are loosing revenue
because they are unable to reach out to their customers.
Vishal Nongbet, senior director and head of marketing at GupShup said
that company could loose as much as 30% of its monthly revenue. Some
estimate the industry wide losses to be around Rs30 million.
A report by international research firm, ComScore had shown that
GupShup had more monthly users than world's largest social networking
site, Facebook in India. Facebook had 22 million unique visitors in
India in August and has emerged as the fastest growing social network.
GupShup under an agreement with the site offers Facebook's mobile
status updates.
Several other business firms have also been affected with the ban in
place. In various parts of the country, mobile phones are the easiest
and most accessible medium of communications and availing services
like banking, health care and even education.
