Simply put, they are telling us this is a social mission but then why is it that they seem so desperate?

The full page ads in newspapers, ad slots on TV, the speeches by Mark Zuckerberg and the polls on Facebook are all part of an extremely aggressive campaign to push Free Basics onto India – even if plenty of us don’t want it.

While the intentions themselves may be noble, the framework isn’t. The SaveTheInternet.in activists have put that down in as simple a manner as possible. IIT, IISC professors have also pitched in with an open letter of their own. But while most in India seem to be getting the message, Facebook and Zuckerberg simply aren’t.

More than half of India’s 320 million internet users – use Facebook and WhatsApp (the instant messaging app that is owned by Facebook) every day. That is huge.

But bigger still is that by 2017, the number of internet subsribers is expected to shoot up to 500 million internet users. These are numbers that Facebook can’t ignore – even in the face of stiff competition. After all, with more than 130 million users, India is Facebook’s second biggest market in the world and it only promises to get better.

Zuckerberg wrote a blog in The Times Of India a couple of days back to take on the critics: “In every society, there are certain basic services that are so important for people’s wellbeing that we expect everyone to be able to access them freely. We have collections of free basic books. They’re called libraries. They don’t contain every book, but they still provide a world of good.”

He further added: “If we accept that everyone deserves access to the internet, then we must surely support free basic internet services. That’s why more than 30 countries have recognized Free Basics as a program consistent with net neutrality and good for consumers. Who could possibly be against this?”

Indeed, who could possibly be against this.

Susan Crawford, visiting professor of law at Harvard University and a co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has one reason why we should be against this. She calls it “a big concern” that Google and Facebook are the ones becoming the portal to Web content for many newcomers.

“For poorer people, Internet access will equal Facebook. That’s not the Internet—that’s being fodder for someone else’s ad-targeting business,” she says. “That’s entrenching and amplifying existing inequalities and contributing to poverty of imagination — a crucial limitation on human life.”

Mahesh Murthy, another net neutrality activist, pointed out how Zuckerberg doesn’t always tell the whole truth in a Facebook post.

India is a market — it is the fastest growing economy in the world — that everyone wants in on and what better way to usher people into the internet through a walled garden. Get them in, let them think of Facebook as the internet. There is no real way to put a value on that.

If Facebook wants to play good Samaritan, then they should do it. Do it without any attached strings. Do it because you feel it is the right thing to do and not because it is a great corporate action plan.