As reported in yesterday’s post on ProPakistani, In the Federal Budget 09, Govt has imposed 20 Paisa tax per SMS, thus killing all those attractive SMS Bundle offers from various cellular services. This new tax is to be imposed from July 1st. Lets analyze how capable is the govt and if finance officers who suggested this tax imposition on SMS, ever thought of those projects that were based on cellular text messages.
Will this new tax kill SMS bundle packages only? So whats the big Deal? The answer is ‘NO’ not only the Bundle Packages, but it is the deliberate attempt to stop the flow of information. Like in the current scenario; where and whenever a news takes place, the information is passed on to the thousands of people through SMS. Remember the Long March Revolution? Where the main source of information flow among the activists and civil society was SMS. This was possible because of those cheap and competitive unlimited SMS packages.
The Govt. might feel being very clever after this move of attempting to stop information, and on the creation of new revenue stream, but one should be thoughtful that the creativity in the IT and Telecom based start-ups is also overlooked.
This tax imposition didn’t only kill the SMS bundle packages, but it has also killed the source of those creative startups based on SMS services. The examples of such startups can be Chopaal.pk, iSMS.pk, Facebook SMS App etc that are entirely SMS based and with this much tax per SMS, it will be impossible to keep up with such creative start-ups.
Not only the existing startups, but all those upcoming SMS based startups will be greatly discouraged and ignored. And if we have a look into the SMS scenario of other countries, developed, developing and even least developed countries have SMS bundle packages.
So I am shocked, extremely disappointed with this new anti-tech budget. We can judge very well that how much our rulers are educated, capable and literate.
