Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (42 page)

For speakers
of tribal languages, such as Gondi, which was rarely written, there was immense attraction in being able to communicate widely through speech. Individuals and organisations searching for ways to make technology serve people’s needs experimented with projects like CGNet Swara, the news-gathering and news-disseminating project in Chhattisgarh, and GramVaani, the citizens’ monitoring and broadcasting project in Jharkhand. With all such projects two challenges stood out: sustainability (how to pay the bills?) and expansion (how to take an idea that worked for a few thousand people and make it work for millions?).

In 2010, India put more than 100 million daily newspapers on the streets each day, more than 45 per cent in Hindi, 3 per cent in English and the rest in nine other scripts and languages. But in the same year, India had more than 600 million mobile phone subscribers. The future of ‘media organisations’ lay with those who could find ways to use the cheap cell phone to convey information and also make a profit. The small-time entrepreneurs and exhibitionists who built huge followings through the mass text-messaging capacity of GupShup opened up a tempting path, but it was a path that led to ‘a “state of stasis”’, reported one analyst.

There is no innovation on the technology front or in a revenue model despite millions frequenting the service. It became a ‘free low-tech service’ that is unable to monetise.
⁴²

As long as talk was cheap, nothing could equal talk’s attraction for the mass of people in twenty-first century India. And to be able to connect with whom one liked, when one liked, across distance, raised possibilities unthinkable in the past.

Politics and governance

Socially, the mobile phone accelerated, widened and deepened change in India. The ability it gave to low-status people to communicate with each other and with sympathetic politicians and officials marked a profound break. In the past, there were words low-caste people should not hear and things they should not know. And to get close enough to a senior official or politician to expose wrong-doing or sloth was impossible for many people.

The mobile
phone augmented bicycles, conviction and organisation to bring the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to power in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 2007 (
Chapter 6
). Subsequent history, however, underlined the truism that people, not technology, win elections. In the next elections in UP in 2012, the BSP, deserted by many disillusioned workers, was resoundingly defeated. The victorious party was led by a young man who liked to be photographed on a bicycle with a mobile phone clapped to one ear and who eulogised the booth-level organisation of his party. UP had more than 120,000 polling booths. The ability to connect with more than 100,000 party workers—however loosely committed a ‘party worker’ might be—could only happen regularly and constantly through mobile phones. All parties by 2012 had mobile phones. The Indian National Congress, which devoted great effort and expense to the 2012 elections in UP, had ample technology, but equipment alone was not enough. A recipe for success required equipment to be combined with committed organisation based on human inspiration and on connections forged between leaders, workers and voters. No Indian political party in the twenty-first century could run an effective election campaign without mobile telephony. But true-believing workers had to be at each end of the phone for technology to affect voters.

The role of the cell phone in gathering ‘flash mobs’ and creating political protests from the overthrow of President Estrada in the Philippines in 2001 to the ‘Arab springs’ of 2011 was widely celebrated. But the phone was only a tool, and often a dangerous tool for those who protested and used it unguardedly. Morozov, dark in his visions, warned that naïve use of technology allowed ‘others to identify the exact location of their owners … once you’ve used a cellphone, you are trapped’.
⁴³
It is neither difficult nor expensive to track mobile-phone messages and conversations, as Indian politicians discovered to their embarrassment (and Iranian protesters sometimes at fatal cost). The ill-considered telephone conversation has been dangerous from the start: in 1896, a French play,
La Demoiselle du téléphone
, revolved around the story of a ‘“telephone girl in the execution of her duties overhearing her lover making an appointment with a music hall ‘artiste’”’.
⁴⁴
The efficacy of the cell phone in politics lay in its being a cheap tool, used for mundane organisational tasks in places that permitted fair elections and public activity. The phone gave groups with limited resources but strong convictions the capacity to connect, mobilise and broadcast. Such capacity was once reserved for the privileged. As a disruptive tool, the cellphone suited democratic India admirably.

For similar
reasons, it suggested practical ways to improve governance—the way in which the state interacts with its citizens. A conversation in Bengalaru in 2010 suggested one of the possibilities: that it was feasible not merely to provide every Indian with an identity number and card but to provide every citizen with a mobile phone.
⁴⁵
The conversation turned on the Aadhaar or Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) project, which aimed to give people an identity number validated through fingerprints and iris scans. If the state provided people with ration cards, voting cards and various subsidies, would it not make sense to provide citizens with a cheap tool to allow them more effective access to services to which they were entitled?

The ‘phone for every citizen’ idea would raise problems of cost, loss, theft, fraud, broadband capacity and human competence. But it was not fanciful. Indeed, it was so practical that in 2012, a desperate Congress Party, searching for popular promises for the 2014 elections, proposed a slogan of ‘
har haath main fon’
(a phone in every hand). The vow was to provide a cell phone and 200 monthly minutes of talk-time to six million households classified as Below the Poverty Line (BPL).
⁴⁶
Even poor, rural people had digital dreams tied to telecommunications, as India’s politicians recognised. The new government of Uttar Pradesh elected in 2012 promised a computer for every high school student, a proposal running to millions of laptops. And the state of Tamil Nadu put colour television sets in more than 300,000 low-income households between 2007 and 2011.
⁴⁷
The scale of a phone-for-every-citizen was not impossible; what was in doubt were the side effects.

From the
late 1990s, Indian governments embarked on computer-based programs intended to improve services to citizens. Andhra Pradesh and its Chief Minister gained global publicity for such initiatives when the US president, Bill Clinton, visited Hyderabad—dubbed Cyberabad—in March 2000. Success, however, varied greatly. One study, published in 2009, concluded that the effect of e-governance ‘in strengthening planning systems and improving the delivery of services to citizens has so far been minimal’.
⁴⁸
E-governance programs invariably required access to computers and basic ability to use them. The simplicity and ubiquity of the mobile phone offered greater potential to connect people regularly to state institutions. In Bihar, government officials—the 534 Block Development Officers or BDOs—were given ten projects in 2009 on which they were to report by text message each day. Their 4,000 daily messages, sent in a standard SMS template, were aggregated by a computer server and turned into a published report. In the past, ‘BDOs took months to prepare a single report’ which was rarely public. Now there were daily reports, available to interested citizens who could see for themselves whether the facts on the ground in their locality squared with what the local officer was reporting to superiors.
⁴⁹

Numerous small experiments were carried on around India and the world. But could small experiments become big, established and financially secure? It was one thing to run a voice-based news service or monitoring system for a few hundred or even a few thousand users and subscribers. But could such services be made to work effectively if there were millions of voices trying to be heard? Would they not dissolve into the cacophony that characterises much of the Internet? Analysts of this nexus between the communications device and political power often speculate about possibilities ‘for new forms of social ties, organisations and behaviours’ and of ‘altering mindsets and behaviour’.
⁵⁰
By 2010, government officers at virtually every level were required to publicise their mobile phone numbers.
⁵¹
Nonetheless, as a short story entitled ‘Mobile Phone’ in a Hindi newspaper suggested, a person was likely to increase her chances of a reply from a local official, if the official’s pre-paid talk time was topped up handsomely in advance by the petitioner—a digital bribe.
⁵²
However, the possibility that such an illegal exaction could be publicised represented a new avenue by which citizens could make the state fulfil its promises and carry out its duties. The greater potential of individuals to record, report and broadcast could enforce new standards of probity and conscientiousness. Officers facing temptation might conclude: because we might be detected, we will behave. The cheap phone provided opportunity to organise, broadcast and appeal to the law.

In some circumstances, too, ‘unprecedented access to information and resources’
⁵³
improved the earning capacity of farmers and fisherfolk, rickshaw drivers, boatmen and
dhobis
—not to say the earning capacity of those who controlled Airtel, Reliance, Tata, Vodafone, Nokia and others.
⁵⁴
A host of new occupations grew up around the mobile-phone industry—recyclers, repairers, second-hand dealers, sales people, advertising agents, marketers, technicians, executives, manufacturers and builders. Some of the new occupations widened opportunities.

Fernand
Braudel wrote of the ‘boundary between possibility and impossibility … between what can … be attained and what remains denied’ to people at particular times in history and of the importance of the moment when there is ‘an extension of the limit of possibility’.
⁵⁵
The cell phone provides such an extension. It makes its owners into potential publishers and documentary makers. It surmounts
physical barriers—‘leaps tall buildings at a single bound’. A person’s voice can bypass the oppressive landlord or unsympathetic policeman, and an individual can arrange a meeting, tell a story, warn a friend, lodge a complaint or call for help without having either to be present or literate. Violations of the law can be photographed and disseminated without the knowledge of perpetrators that their actions have been captured.

The cell phone drew India’s people into relations with the record-keeping capitalist state more comprehensively than any previous mechanism or technology. By itself, none of this overturned power structures or ironed out inequality, yet, as Braudel wrote of the improvements in road transport 180 years ago, it did make conditions ‘faster, more efficient and’—a matter of hope and promise—‘more democratic’.
⁵⁶

NOTES

PREFACE

  
1.
   At the time, the rupee
was worth about 29 to the USD, but throughout the book we use a rough calculation of Rs 50 to US $1.00, which was where the rupee hovered in 2010.

INTRODUCTION: ‘SO UNCANNY AND OUT OF PLACE’

  
1.
   While the Anglicised name is the River Ganges, we use the name Ganga as the river is popularly known. Varanasi is the official name for the city, though the name Banaras is equally popular and we use both names throughout the book.

  
2.
   We use ‘mobile’ and ‘cell’ phone interchangeably as the terms commonly are in India.

  
3.
   Vishnu Bhatt and Godshe Versaikar,
1857. The Real Story of the Great Uprising
, trans. Mrinal Pande (New Delhi: Harper Perennial, 2011), p. 205.

  
4.
   Giogio Riello and Peter McNeill, ‘A Long Walk: Shoes, People and Places’, in Giogio Riello and Peter McNeill (eds),
Shoes: a History from Sandals to Sneakers
(New York: Berg, 2006), p. 12.

  
5.
   But even shoes were not that common. A survey in 1989 estimated that Indians acquired one new pair of shoes or sandals every two years.
Business India
, 17–30 April 1989, p. 87.

  
6.
   Allen Shaw, ‘History of the Watch’,
http://reference.arama.com/fashionstyle/45078.php
(accessed 28 June 2012).

  
7.
   Telecom Regulatory Authority of India [TRAI], ‘Information Note to the Press (Press Release No. 51/2011’, 20 October 2011, p. 1.

  
8.
   
Traffic and Market Report on the Pulse of the Networked Society
(Stockholm: Ericsson, 2012), p. 5,
http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2012/traffic_and_
market_report_june_2012.pdf
(accessed 3 July 2012).

  
9.
   
Information and Communications for Development 2012: Maximizing Mobile
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012), p. xi,
http://www.worldbank.org/ict/IC4D2012(accessed 31 July 2012)
.