&gt; Note that data plans are pretty cheap in India.<p>Cheap enough for the 60% of rural Indians who live on less than 35 Rs&#x2F;day [1]?<p>&gt; The cost of a smartphone that can handle modern websites (especially Facebook, which breaks on old&#x2F;slow phones and browsers) is more than the cost of a few year&#x27;s worth of data.<p>The vast majority of mobile phones in India are feature phones which are considerably cheaper than smartphones [2]. To be included in Free Basics, sites have to work reasonably on feature phones. Free Basics sites are accessed through a proxy which modifies requests so that the sites can tell that they are being viewed by a Free Basics user, and so the site can present a version that works without requiring &quot;modern&quot; features like JavaScript, SVG images and WOFF font types, iframes, video and large images, or Flash and Java applets.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com&#x2F;2012-05-04&#x2F;news&#x2F;31559329_1_rural-areas-mpce-nsso-survey" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com&#x2F;2012-05-04&#x2F;news...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.igadgetsworld.com&#x2F;india-smartphone-and-feature-phone-market-share-in-q3-2014&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.igadgetsworld.com&#x2F;india-smartphone-and-feature-ph...</a>