Authors: Robin Jeffrey
But to protect
whom from what? The state from violence and sedition? Long-held ‘family values’ from the autonomy that young women and men might acquire from a cell phone? The innocent and the respectable from explicit sex and sexual violence? Vulnerable citizens from bullies and stalkers? Ordinary citizens from fraudsters? Unsuspecting young girls from scheming old men?
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Society from big-time criminals and terrorists? Culpable states and their servants from public exposure? Most countries shared similar challenges. By the late 1990s, 80 per cent of drug dealers in the US were said to be ‘using cloned mobile phones’.
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Some countries waged war on pornography and targeted the corporations that enabled sexually explicit images to spread. BlackBerry yielded to the demands of the Indonesian government to filter out such material circulating through its mobile-phone services in 2011.
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China’s monitoring, eavesdropping and censoring of cell-phone and other digital traffic were notorious.
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For authoritarian governments, closing down of mobile-phone systems at times of crisis was a standby, though one that could backfire.
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India experimented
with a host of initiatives to establish mobile phone laws and cyber-security frameworks; but provisions were scattered across ‘various statutes and governmental guidelines and rules’.
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In 2012, proposals were made to establish a ‘telecommunications security testing laboratory’ to certify that all telecom equipment conformed to government regulations and did not harbour illegal tapping or disruptive devices. Such an organisation, however, was many months or years away from functioning. State police forces established modest mobile cyber-crime labs that attended crime scenes and collected evidence effectively.
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Indian governments, however, faced a problem that wealthy states such as those in Japan, western Europe and North America had not solved: how to mitigate the evils that mobile phones could generate, while preserving their capacity to improve even a poor citizen’s ability to take advantage of the rights of democratic citizenship.
‘IT’S THE AUTONOMY, STUPID’
Mobile communication is not about mobility but about autonomy.
Manuel Castells
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We began this book with the fantasy of a film’s opening sequence—the feet, the footwear and the phones in the rowboat in Banaras and the penthouse in Mumbai. How would our film have proceeded? The body of the book provides clues. Our film would hinge on the relationships and networks that grow from mobile phones. Imagine our elegant businessman in Mumbai to be a supercilious and superior character who chuckles at the presumption of the boatman and says off the cuff before ending the call, ‘Come to Mumbai. Give me a call. We’ll talk about your problems’. Our boatman, being a simple, literal man, takes this as an invitation and sets off with his family on the 1,300-kilometre (880 miles) journey to Mumbai. At once, we have a ‘road movie’ with family themes, no end of adventures and every scene pegged around a mobile phone and its connections. Imaginative readers, having understood the facets of life that cheap mobile telephony affects, will have no trouble filling in detail from their favourite Bollywood movies. A gun battle on Chowpatty Beach, a dawn cricket match and a wedding video on the screen of a 4G mobile might form the closing moments.
This book
has tried to understand the profound change that cheap mobiles brought to life in India. Why only India? Because India contained a complexity rivalled only by the world itself: a population of 1.2 billion, a resilient system of hierarchy founded on ‘caste’ and the only country that published newspapers and wrote SMSes in eleven different scripts. The intricacy of India sometimes suggested the world in miniature. We make a case therefore for a book about India on two grounds: that India is so large that it is worth knowing about for size alone; and that India is so complex that studying it helps to understand the nuances of an unjust, unequal, intensively mediated yet deeply divided world.
The mobile phone provided access to global flows of knowledge; altered local cultural practices; mobilised political and social movements; and challenged gender dynamics. These changes happened within a broader context, sometimes labelled Indian neoliberalism, characterised by an accelerating economy, ballooning consumerism and a middle class yearning for full-scale participation in the global economy. This globalising India, to which vast numbers of people were increasingly connected by their cell phones, often collided with the realities of everyday life; power structures and social practices were challenged. The mobile phone could be the cause of such contests, as well as a weapon and a prize. This is particularly evident in concerns about sexuality, gender relations and what some view as the corrupting influences of ‘the West’. The cell phone embodied aspirations and anxieties of an age of rapid, fundamental change.
The proliferation of mobile phones after 2004 makes us forget the faltering arrival of the technology and the ten lean years from 1994. Indian governments and capitalists had to discover ways of accommodating political interests, bureaucratic rivalries and bottom-line essentials. To most Indians in those years, mobile phones were exotic, expensive and incomprehensible. The Great Indian Phone had to be cheap and simple, and then its cheapness and simplicity had to be explained and made available from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.
Thereafter, the
effects of the cheap cell phone cascaded downwards, slowly at first and then with stunning rapidity. From January 2000 when the cost of a mobile-phone call fell from Rs 16 a minute to Rs 4, the device came within the means of ever larger numbers of people. For those companies that had fought to control Radio Frequency spectrum, the key lay in getting very small profits from a very large number of users. Thus followed the need to make phones available at affordable prices, educate people about their simplicity and affordability and ensure that cell-phone services lived up to what advertisements promised. These processes required the involvement of millions of people as missionaries and mechanics. By 2010, as we have seen, Vodafone alone had more than a million sales points.
This book has tried to outline the processes and the activity that the mobile phone generated. But where does all this lead? What happens in a mass-based, mobile-phone future? A number of areas merit scrutiny. They include health, recycling and the environment, social networks, language and media, and politics and governance. Each prompts questions that will occupy scholars, policy makers and business analysts for many years.
Health
Cell phones affect ‘health’ in two ways. In the happy scenario that characterised our film script, they allow people to get medical aid quickly. Recall the 1960s advertisement in
Chapter 1
for the virtues of Indian-made radio telephones—the soldier saved because his colleagues were able to radio-telephone for help. Mobile phones enable women in labour to get to medical centres or midwives to get to them. Transport reaches the ill and the injured. Beyond that, numerous experiments seek to develop digital features that will enable phones to do eye checks, test blood pressure and send photographs to specialists who can evaluate the seriousness of an injury or condition. There are plenty of positive stories. By 2009, for example, Microsoft had more than a dozen project reports for simple cell-phone applications to enable medical people to diagnose distant patients. These programs helped with the diagnosis of pneumonia and of disorders in pregnancy. They enabled the monitoring of diabetes, and technicians aimed to perfect a diagnostic microscope based on a cell phone that would allow a health worker to transmit sophisticated data to specialists in a distant centre.
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‘Health applications’, the World Bank declared, ‘have the potential to transform health care systems in low-income economies’.
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Such devices
were not panaceas. Skilled and well-equipped medical workers were needed to help people recover from disease and injury. But the capacity of cell phones to make such interventions more common did more than merely bring better diagnosis. As such interventions became more common in far-flung places, people might be expected to demand such attention as a right. The ubiquity and connectedness of mobile phones improved people’s knowledge of services and planted a sense that it was their right to demand what they knew others had received. Change in expectations was almost as important as change in actual treatment.
The other side of the coin, however, concerns long-term health hazards from the air pollution and radiation emitted by cell phones and the 400,000 towers that enable Indian networks to operate. One school of thought suggests that it will take another generation before the effects of widespread radiation from individual handsets and cell-phone towers become known. At their bleakest, such interpretations contend that the parallels are with commodities like asbestos or thalidomide: ill effects will only be tangible when it is too late for many.
In 2006, the World Health Organization concluded that ‘from all evidence accumulated so far, no adverse short or long-term health effects have been shown to occur from the R[adio] F[requency] signals produced by base stations’ and that local-area networks in homes and offices produced even lower RF than base stations.
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Others, however, were not so sure. An experiment in Punjab that placed a cell-phone handset in a colony of bees for 15 minutes a day for three months had the effect of ‘wreaking havoc on the homing instinct’ of the bees and leading to the disintegration of the colony. The research, published in 2010, got attention in New York, London and round the world.
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A US law firm specialising in actions against corporations asserted ‘that there is research from around the world that indicates a strong correlation between extensive cell phone use and brain tumours’
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The news magazine
Tehelka
focused on the possible dangers of RF from cell phones and the towers that transmitted their signals. Suggesting that Delhi’s 6,000 towers meant that ‘four-fifths of Delhi lives in unsafe zones’,
Tehelka
claimed to have initiated ‘an extensive survey of 100 spots … in [the] public interest’.
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It asserted that 40 of the 100 locations showed an ‘extreme anomaly’ and emitted radiation ‘close to seven times the safe limit’. It told readers that ‘EMR [electromagnetic radiation] is like slow poison’ and ‘in time’ people ‘may develop a high risk of cancer’.
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While the gist of the campaign—that there was little checking on emissions from handsets or towers—was justified, the report’s credibility was partially undermined by excited assertions and the fact that its survey partner had an interest in selling radiation-protection equipment.
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Companies selling radiation-protection gear sensed unease among many Indians about the radioactive effects of the towers and phones and the contradictory information about their impact. (See
Illus. 36
). And there were more tangible and immediate concerns, especially in urban areas. In Banaras many towers were located in people’s backyards where they emitted noise and air pollution throughout the day. Electric power from the mains failed frequently, and fuming diesel engines ran the electronic equipment and the air-conditioning units most of the time. The huge increase in air pollution and the overall carbon footprint resulting from the diesel-powered mobile phone towers became a major concern. NGOs, some government departments and various industry bodies called for stricter regulations, better enforcement and the phasing out of diesel-generated power in favour of renewable energy, such as wind and solar.
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Mobile waste
Another sombre side of the mobile phone industry, which promised to grow darker in the future, was electronic waste or e-waste. There was little sustained research on the ‘after life’ of mobile phones, even though they were overtaking personal computers as the device producing the most e-waste. Cell phones were prized for metals, especially the rare metals and minerals (rare-earths) they contained (e.g., coltan); but not a lot was known about which metals were recovered, how this was done and what became of the salvaged material.
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The various stages of collecting, sorting and extracting the valuable components in a mobile phone presented dangers to people’s safety and health. Recycling processes often used crude methods that released toxic substances such as lead and cadmium into the air, soil and water—and into the bodies of the recyclers themselves.
The appetite
for consumer goods, especially electronic devices, meant India produced staggering amounts of e-waste. Reports showed that India had also become a dumping ground. According to estimates by Toxic Link, a Delhi-based NGO, India was ‘estimated to be generating approximately 400,000 tonnes of waste annually (computers, mobile phone and television only) and is expected to grow at a much higher rate of 10–15 per cent’.
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A United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) report predicted that e-waste from discarded mobile phones in India alone, would grow by 18 times its 2007 levels within a decade.
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