India is being invited to cheer the largest IPO in its history. Before it does, it should read the one sentence in the coverage that explains what the celebration is for: analysts say Jio's future returns could depend on "increased revenue per user."
That is a polite way of saying the people who were given cheap data will be asked to pay more of it.
The defense of Jio is not stupid, and the Left should say so. When Jio launched in 2016 with free data, it put the internet in the pockets of hundreds of millions of Indians who had been priced out. India now has some of the cheapest mobile data in the world. Villagers take video calls, small merchants take digital payments, and students attend classes on a phone. That is real, and no honest critic should sneer at it.
But look at how it was built. Jio's pricing was not charity. It was a strategy of deep-pocketed predation: sell below cost until rivals bleed out, then collect. Aircel and Tata Docomo are gone, and Vodafone Idea survives only because the government converted its debts into a large public stake. The market that was once crowded is now effectively a duopoly. Prices rose sharply in 2024, and the IPO tells us what comes next. Public markets do not pay a $150 billion-plus valuation for generosity. They pay for pricing power.
This is the part the "India Shining" framing leaves out. The spectrum Jio runs on is a public resource, owned in principle by the Indian people and licensed to private operators. The risk was socialized: regulators, rivals' lenders and the state's balance sheet absorbed the carnage. The upside is being privatized, to the Ambani family, which keeps more than 64 percent through Reliance, and to Meta and Google, which bought in early and now cash in on the investor frenzy. A retail investor buying shares on debut is mostly buying a seat at the table where the family and two American platform giants have already eaten.
Speaking of those two. Meta and Google are not neutral bystanders but partners in a company whose managing director says its next decade is about artificial intelligence, cloud, connected devices and satellite connectivity. That is a plan to sit on top of the data of a country of 1.4 billion people. India's data protection regime is thin, with broad carve-outs for the state, and the regulator that is supposed to police a telecom giant is not famous for picking fights with it. Critics of this government have asked for years why the Ambani and Adani empires seem to find policy winds at their backs. An IPO celebrated at this scale makes that question harder to ask and more important.
The Left's job here is not to wish Jio away. It is to insist on terms. Treat a company that controls a gateway to the digital economy as the utility it has become. Enforce tariff transparency and real competition, including a revived, properly funded public option in BSNL rather than a managed decline. Pass data rules that bind the government and corporations alike. And before anyone calls this a triumph of Indian enterprise, ask who gets to be "Indian" in the ownership table.
A market debut is a story about shareholders. The 450-million-plus subscribers are not in that story. They are in the revenue line, and the revenue line is about to be asked to grow.
How it may affect me
If you are a Jio subscriber, expect pressure for higher tariffs and shifts toward bundled premium plans, since investors are looking for rising revenue per user. Compare plans across operators before renewing long-term, and check what data-sharing permissions you grant to Jio's apps.
