Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (24 page)

These neighbourhood shopkeepers already sold pre-paid services for mobile phones. To register an EKO account, a person followed procedures similar to registering a SIM card. Proof of identity—a ration card or a voter-enrolment card—and a photograph had to be presented. While the transactions themselves were paperless, EKO distributed a small kit to account holders, containing illustrated explanations and, most importantly, a booklet which listed a series of pin numbers. These provided account holders with security over their transactions.

How did it work? After registering an account with EKO, if a client wished to deposit Rs 100, she gave Rs 100 to the shopkeeper and waited while the shopkeeper did the following on the shopkeeper’s own phone:

To withdraw money, or send money to a recipient with an EKO account, the procedure was the same, except that mobile phone number of the person receiving the money became part of the transaction.

EKO identified existing needs and aimed to satisfy them more effectively.
⁴³
As with M-PESA in Kenya, the majority of customers used EKO services for remittances. In Delhi, for example, migrant workers from Bihar led the way.
⁴⁴
The mobile-phone system allowed migrants to bypass costly, cumbersome processes that previously hampered their ability to send money home. The system avoided the daunting task of opening a bank
account and reduced the uncertainties and charges involved in transferring money through the formal banking system: paperwork, delays due to bank clearances and the time taken to go to a bank branch and wait to be served. Unlike bank branches, local shops were often open for long hours and on holidays. Transfers were immediate: once money was deposited the person received a text message and could draw cash.

Maintaining the system was more complex. A shopkeeper needed to have cash on hand to pay to EKO customers who made withdrawals. Shopkeepers were supplied by couriers who replenished cash whenever necessary, but couriers had to be trained, trusted and supplied with cash from old-style bank branches. Shopkeepers’ own balances of EKO-related funds, and their commissions (0.3 per cent of every transaction) from EKO, were maintained centrally and accessible to shopkeepers through their mobile phone. Because all transactions were electronically registered, errors and the potential to siphon off money were minimised. Shopkeepers received a half day’s training in the procedures; support and advice were available at the EKO end of their mobile phone.

Basic banking through the mobile phone brought the advantages of a bank account to large numbers of people, previously too poor, unlettered or frightened to confront the forbidding formality of a bank office. For migrant workers, these advantages included, as they had for migrants who flocked to M-PESA in Kenya, the ability to send money home quickly, cheaply and safely and to keep earnings safe, not tied in a handkerchief or hidden in a box under a bed. A bank account also gave poor people, who were entitled to payments from governments or other sources, a secure and prompt way of receiving their dues. This promised to reduce the ability of paymasters who handled cash to demand bribes in exchange for handing over entitlements. At the same time, such arrangements could disrupt long-standing family patterns if payments to a woman, which once came in cash and were seized by her husband or his relatives, now came to an invisible mobile-phone account in her name.

Mobile-phone banking could be disturbing, and could provoke resistance, as a project in the state of Bihar illustrated. When EKO and the Norway-India Partnership Initiative (NIPI), introduced Mobile Money Transfer (MMT) in January 2011 for women who worked as Accredited Social Health
Activists (ASHAs), household tensions arose. Some husbands banned their wives from having mobile phones (
Chapter 7
). Yet the benefits of such a system of payment were clear. For the women who worked as health-care providers, receiving and saving their salaries had long been a problem, though the importance of timely payment was crucial for their household budgeting. In poor households, delays in payment had economic, social and evening-meal implications. They compromised a woman’s status:

Taking up a position of ASHA was not easy for [the women]. Many wanted a relief from the crushing poverty due [to] unemployed/alcoholic husbands… Some took on the job to augment the family resources… many had to face a lot of opposition and had to struggle to convince the family. Essentially the objections were based on the fear that she may become too independent, may interact with men outside the family; [and the] work load will fall on the mother-in-law if daughter-in-law goes out to work, among other things.
⁴⁵

For women whose families allowed them to go out of the house and work as ASHAs, regular payment showed that the risk to a woman’s reputation if she moved about independently was worth taking. Families, however, needed to be convinced:

The main issue was suspicion that ASHAs may contact other men, misuse the freedom, will get unwanted calls. Also the perception was that when a man has a mobile he will use it for making money, where a woman may just chat and use up the call time.
⁴⁶

By transferring payments through the mobile, women accessed many of the facilities of a bank account, including the ability to check their balance, transfer money and receive interest on their account at four per cent a year—all without leaving home.
⁴⁷

The simplicity of the phone was one of its advantages. Close to 70 per cent of the women in the survey got their first phone when they became an ASHA. They told the researcher that the

mobile phone … gives us a bit of autonomy and has enabled us to take independent decisions away from the collective family decisions to some extent. The ownership of phone has made it possible for us women, with little or no land ownership, to have a sense of freedom and identity [sic] albeit limited.
⁴⁸

More than money was involved. Relations within families were disrupted in ways that many people would see as positive. As regular payment began to arrive without
long waiting times in offices or bribes paid to cashiers,
⁴⁹
opposition to women’s work and women’s phones subsided in some families.
Chapter 7
explores the new, almost-daily transactions and decisions that phones forced on families.

EKO was not alone in searching for ways to use the mobile phone as a poor (or rich) person’s bank account. By the end of 2011, phone manufacturers, service providers and banks were exploring ways to use the mobile to get banking to the poor, and make a profit using the Vodafone M-PESA mobile banking model. Nokia, the handset maker, started services in Pune, Chandigarh and Nasik, all prosperous large cities.
⁵⁰
The two great service competitors, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone, launched phone banking in partnership with the State Bank of India (Airtel) and the ICICI Bank (Vodafone).
⁵¹

The challenge lay not so much in technology—putting basic banking services onto mobile phones—but in the logistics of finding thousands of outlets to act as mini-banks, training their owners and keeping them supplied with cash and information. The challenge was labour-intensive. ‘Retailers are very street-smart people and it takes us half a day’ to train them as EKO agents, Abhishek Sinha said. But even in its early stages in 2010, EKO had to have twenty of its own fulltime employees liaising with FMCG agents who in turn had hundreds of employees who visited and supplied small shopkeepers.
⁵²
Vodafone by 2011 had more than a million outlets dispensing Vodafone products of various cost and complexity, and the company aimed to turn these agents into banking outlets. Airtel similarly had 500,000 outlets that it aimed to train and supply.
⁵³
‘Upscaling’—increasing the number of customers—depended on increasing the number of outlets whose owners had to be trained, supplied and informed. More than half of the Indian population did not have bank accounts. To put a mobile-phone banking agent within reach required hundreds of thousands of outlets and tens of thousands of people. The people linked the outlets to the formal banking system by delivering cash, PIN code documentation and marketing information.

On the river …

Located on the sacred River Ganga, the city of Banaras (Varanasi) has been a pilgrimage centre for thousands of years. Unlike the ocean-going fishermen of Kerala, the majority of river
boatmen in Varanasi relied on passengers, not fish, for their livelihood. Pilgrims and visitors were the main source of income, and the boatmen’s boats were their means of production. Mobile phones caused ripples on the Ganga, improving the lives of some and complicating the lives of most, as Sujit’s story illustrates.

Tourism and pilgrimage were big business in Banaras, with groups of pilgrims constantly flocking to the riverfront to worship and bathe. Whether they came to the city by bus, train or plane, visitors reached the riverfront mostly by roads which led to the major ghats—the steps down to the river’s edge—such as Dashash vamedh Ghat, Assi Ghat or Raj Ghat. Different ghats had different earning potential for historical, cultural and architectural reasons, and Dashashvamedh Ghat maintained supremacy over all other ghats. Its central location and religious significance made it a pivotal point in the city. It would be misleading to speak of Dashashvamedh Ghat as one ghat, as its territory consisted of several distinct ghats. The main road leading to the ghat area branched out into several lanes, each leading to a different set of steps descending to the ghats. Most ghats were only accessible by foot or scooter via the small alleys and were relatively insignificant; pilgrims and tourists were few. On those ghats, resident boatmen earned less and were poorer than their peers on the large popular ghats.

Sujit was a boatman from the small Nishad Raj Ghat who often worked as ‘driver’ (
mallahi
) for a resident boatman (
ghatwar
) from Assi Ghat. When Doron met him in 1999, this was a common practice. On most of the major ghats, the ‘drivers’ rowed and maintained the boats of the resident boatmen (
ghatwars
) and received 50 per cent of the earnings. There was no binding contract between the
mallahis
and the
ghatwars
. Even then, some of the
mallahis
shifted from one ghat to another according to demand, and they were often employed during the busy times of the year on the major ghats where there was a large flow of passengers.

With the arrival of the mobile phone, some boatmen were able to neutralise the advantages of the
ghatwars
who owned larger boats on more popular ghats. Sujit became one such beneficiary. Longstanding conventions had decreed that when a visitor entered the territory of a particular ghat, boatmen immediately staked their claim to the person.
⁵⁴
By making a call (
boli
) the
ghatwar
had the right to approach the potential passengers to
offer a boat ride and negotiate a price. Only
ghatwars
were allowed to participate in this bidding system, and a
ghatwar
had to be present on the ghat to do so. A moral economy underpinned this system: subsistence was guaranteed to all boatmen on the ghats through norms of reciprocity and redistribution. Poorer boatmen could rely on the dominant and more prosperous classes to ensure a minimum income during desperate times. Some boatmen, however, had always been frustrated with the system, arguing that it favoured owners and workers on the major ghats and limited social mobility and initiative.

A key exception in the old system lay in the category of ‘known passenger’ (
parichit savaari
). These were people with whom a boatman could claim a previous relationship and whom he had the right to pick up wherever they appeared. The conventions relating to the daily tourist and pilgrim traffic did not apply; a boatman could collect his established client unchallenged. The mobile phone allowed a boatman to forge relationships with an ever-increasing pool of potential passengers and undermine the old customs, as Sujit explained.

In May 2009 Sujit looked after a group of pilgrims from the western state of Gujarat and established particularly good relations with them. While they were in Banaras, he gave them his mobile phone number and told them that if they needed anything or got lost in the alleys that lead to the major temples, they could call him. More than a year later, Sujit received a call from one of the group informing him that another party from the same region of Gujarat was planning a pilgrimage to Banaras. He requested Sujit to make arrangements for their boat rides. Sujit said he would meet them at the railway station. A small boatman from a minor ghat was becoming a travel agent.

However, as a boatman from a lesser ghat, Sujit owned a small boat which could barely carry six passengers. To cater for fifty Gujarati pilgrims he had to ask a relative from Raj Ghat, one of the major ghats on the north of the riverfront, to borrow his boat in return for 50 per cent of the earnings. Overall, Sujit made a considerable sum of money from the Gujarati tour party, not only from the boat rides themselves, but from ancillary activities associated with pilgrimage, such as taking pilgrims to sari shops from which he received commission.