iPhone - A failure in India

iPhone - the most talked about phone of the last 2 years, failed to make any impact in India. The reason for this can be summarized in one statement probably.
The iPhone is a 'data intensive' phone and operators in India are anti-data.
I think everyone agrees with the first part of the statement.
The whole iPhone experience 'lures' people to do more and more browsing of the internet from their phone.
Companies like AdMob get a significant share of their ad-revenues from iPhone browsing which is skewed when compared to iPhone's overall market share in mobile phones.
Coming to the 2nd part - anti-data means that operators in India DO NOT want their subscribers to use GPRS heavily.
When the whole world economy is slowing down - the indian mobile market is
STILL booming to say the least.
In Jan '09 - India added 20 mn+ susbcribers ( in a month!) - that is more than 4 times the population of Singapore!

With the base growing at such a rapid pace, the network of the operators is getting clogged
with voice traffic. We are seeing 'call-drops' and 'please try again later' situations in the network more and more.
In such a situation, the operator does not want his subscriber to use GPRS which will
clog the network even more - since in 2.5G - data runs over the idle voice-channels.

Moreover, whatever channel is free, the operator wants it subscriber to use it for
voice as he makes more money when the subs uses voice as opposed to data!
No wonder, the operators insanely priced in the phone in the Rs. 31 - 36K bracket
- surpassing even the top-notch Nokia phones.

A report in Business Week claims that there were less than 20,000 iPhones sold in India!

Thats a dismal number for any phone in a 300 million+ mobile subscriber base!