E-commerce sites are getting a surge in activity from phone-users.Д«ut this budding revolution needs clever regulation. Already a quarter of internet traffic is from phones, compared with a seventh worldwide.

India is poised to leapfrog the era of the personal computer and go straight to the mobile-internet age. IndiaвЂ™s fixed-line system may be abysmal, but cheap smartphones and fast wireless networks are rapidly spreading. The second change is the mobile internet.

Tens of millions of people are benefiting as a result. They are transforming mundane areas such as bus tickets, and opening up scores of smaller cities to modern retailing. New firms such as Flipkart and Redbus are adapting Western e-commerce models to deal with IndiaвЂ™s rickety logistics and cash-based economy. As in California, failure is no longer frowned upon in India. Many are battle-hardened through previous ventures that flopped, from dairy farms to bowling alleys. Many have gained valuable experience working in America or for multinational firms. Optimism springs, first, from a healthy stock of young entrepreneurs (see article). The good news is that India now has a chance to lead again the bad news is that this opportunity relies in part on DelhiвЂ™s bureaucrats not messing it up. As the wages of IndiaвЂ™s engineers rise, its IT industry cannot rely for ever on doing straightforward work cheaply for foreigners. Feeling luckierД¬atching up should be a priority for India-not least because its outsourcing champions are now reaching middle age. The original emerging-market tech pioneer has fallen behind in the internet era. Venture capitalists grumble that their returns have been poor. In 2010-11 lots of start-ups raised cash, but they have struggled since. Instead, it has seen a succession of false dawns, from its version of the dotcom bubble in 1998-2002 to more recent hype over deal-of-the-day websites and text-based cricket updates. India boasts no big internet firms to compare with Chinese giants such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, nor start-up stars like FacebookвЂ™s Mark Zuckerberg. Thanks to lousy infrastructure, useless regulation and a famously corrupt telecoms sector, the web is available to only 10% of Indians, many of them squinting at screens in cafГ©s. And at home e-commerce is in its infancy, with sales only 6% of ChinaвЂ™s. But only a few start-ups have made clever technical innovations that have been sold abroad. You might have expected IndiaвЂ™s many advantages (the English language, abundant engineers and a thriving diaspora in Silicon Valley) to pay off spectacularly on the internet. Yet India has been a comparative failure in terms of innovation over the past decade. IndiaвЂ™s reputation in the world has changed, too: BangaloreвЂ™s shining IT campuses have become as famous as the Ganges and the Gandhis. Young Indians have seen that globalisation creates winners. Millions of good jobs in India have been created. It has annual sales of $100 billion, mostly from abroad, and these export earnings have been vital in a country with a weak balance of payments. Today that outsourcing industry is a capitalist marvel.

Its first tech revolution began 30 years ago, when a few engineers came up with the unlikely idea of doing back-office IT work for far-off Western firms. INFORMATION technology has been a mighty force for good in India.

Rickety cricket revolution