Reliance Jio turns 3 today. A lookback at how the idea came from Isha Ambani

India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani has credited the idea of the country’s youngest and only profitable telecom operator Reliance Jio to his daughter Isha Ambani who had complained of slow internet speeds at her Mumbai house when she was on a holiday break during her college days at Yale.

The three-year-old phenomenon could be a perfect case study of a disruptive business model in a hyper-competitive telecom sector in a country of a billion people, most deprived of internet before 2016 or had access to expensive mobile data.

“The idea of Jio was first seeded by my daughter, Isha, in 2011. She was a student at Yale (in the US) and was home for holidays. She wanted to submit some coursework, and she said, “Dad, the internet in our house sucks,” Ambani had told an audience in London in March 2018 after receiving the Financial Times-ArcelorMittal award for “boldness in business”.