Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (8 page)

The Government of India built the telegraph from 1851 for reasons of strategy, not profit or social benefit.
³¹
The telegraph enabled the railways to function safely, and it gave the British government an immense strategic advantage. Rulers needed to control information—to know more than their subjects, just as the Mughals had been well aware 200 years earlier. The great revolt of 1857 was in part ‘a struggle … between the British and the insurgents over the control of modern media of information’.
³²
The broad outline of an all-India telegraph system had been completed just before the revolt began, and a last message from British soldiers in Delhi before they were killed in May 1857 alerted British authorities throughout north India to the fact that a major revolt had begun and that the capital of the Mughal empire had expelled the British. An Indian soldier being led to the gallows was said to have gestured towards a telegraph wire: ‘There is the accursed string that strangles us’.
³³
The mutinying soldiers recognised the threat: ‘they … attacked the telegraph posts and knocked them down’, wrote the young Brahmin pilgrim caught up in the revolt.
³⁴
The capacity to exchange information almost instantly represented an immense power, which rulers sought to control tightly.

British governments treated
the telephone, like the telegraph, as a device primarily for the state but which others might use for special occasions. (Contrast this with the mobile phone whose most popular use in many cultures is to ‘keep in touch’ and ‘spread the social network’).
³⁵
Alexander Graham Bell was said to have made telephony work for the first time in 1876 when he summoned an assistant in a basement at the other end of a wire: ‘Mr Watson. Come here. I want you’. When Bell, aged 29, registered the patent, he described the new device as ‘an improvement in telegraphy’.
³⁶
Governments in India quickly picked up the technology: the princely state of Travancore in what is today southern Kerala installed a telephone to connect the Maharaja’s palace with the government offices in 1878.
³⁷
The Government of India licensed private companies to provide telephone services in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata in 1881. Mumbai and Kolkata had exchanges operating a year later. The Kolkata exchange in 1882 had 50 lines, connecting officials to officials.
³⁸
The telephone was a tool of government, nicely illustrated by the first automatic exchange, not in one of the great cities, but in the summer capital, the hill station of Shimla.
³⁹

For a foreign government, the telephone seemed a controllable medium. It did not send messages to multitudes; it needed expensive equipment and government-maintained wires to operate; and anyone who owned a phone had to be known to the government. It lacked the capacity to reach large numbers of people, whether to arouse them or sell to them. These qualities may have made the phone more palatable to M. K. Gandhi. The ‘father of the nation’ did not like radio or the movies and was suspicious of the advertising that dominated most newspapers. The telephone, however, aroused no such fears. In his
Collected Works
, there are frequent references to his talking on the phone, and he was happy to be photographed with a phone in hand. He gave explicit and thoughtful instructions about how the telephone box at the Sevagram ashram was to be designed.
⁴⁰
He showed remarkable comfort with the telephone for a man who had written in
Hind Swaraj
:

Machinery is like a snake-hole which may contain from one to a hundred snakes. Where there is machinery, there are large cities; where there are large cities, there are tram-cars and railways. And there only does one see electric light. Honest physicians will tell you that where means of artificial locomotion have increased, the health of the people has suffered. I remember that, when in a European town there was scarcity of money, the receipts of the tramway company, of the lawyers and of the doctors went down, and the people were less unhealthy. I cannot recall a single good point in connection with machinery.
⁴¹

The Gandhian attitude may explain
two aspects of Indian approaches to telephony. First, it was considered benign and endorsed by Gandhi as a way an inveterate letter-writer like him might communicate person-to-person and get instant replies. Second, however, it was to be treated as a rare device used only for important purposes. He stipulated in designing the phone box for the ashram that

the telephone cabin should be located outside the office, so that the telephone would be accessible even when the office is closed and … the telephone used whenever necessary.
⁴²

Such an attitude helps to explain why the telephone was treated like a beneficial colonial legacy after independence, something that helped government and business and might in emergencies be availed of by the general population.

When India awoke to life and freedom in 1947, it had about 100,000 telephones for a population of 340 million people: one telephone for every 3,400 people.
⁴³
Growth was not a priority, and it came slowly. Bombay, India’s commercial centre, had an ‘outstanding demand for telephones’ of 34,000 in 1955 when the Communications Minister announced what the
Times of India
described as ‘Big Plan for “Phones in Bombay City”’.
⁴⁴
Five years later, however, ‘the telephone service goes on deteriorating’ lamented the
Economic Weekly
, and ‘the waiting list of applicants … goes on lengthening … If this is the state … in India’s premier city [Bombay], one can imagine the condition in the rest of the country …’
⁴⁵
By 1970, the national waiting list for a telephone was estimated at 700,000 with a waiting period of more than four years. ‘The prospects of easy availability of connections even ten years hence appear bleak’.
⁴⁶
By 1987, the waiting list stood, with mystifying precision, at 842,567; and 3.3 million of the installed phones were deemed to be ‘outdated instruments’.
⁴⁷

The spread of telephones marched a little ahead of the growth of the Indian economy for the first forty-four years of independence prior to the ‘liberalisation’ that began in 1991. By that year, India had 5.1 million phones, an increase of just under 10 per cent a year from 1948.
⁴⁸
And the number of people queuing
around each phone to make a call had improved—there was now one phone for every 165 people. (See
Table 1.1
). But many of these phones, as we know, were in government offices or businesses, often in locked boxes to be used only for official purposes after a would-be caller had been provided with the key.

Table 1.1: Phone Connections in India, 1947 to 2011.

Sources:
Statistical Outline of India
(Mumbai: Tata Services) and
India: a Reference Annual
(New Delhi: Publications Division) for relevant years.

How did ‘ordinary people’—the overworked
aam aadmii
of Indian political rhetoric—communicate? Before the British, as we have seen, they communicated by word of mouth, transmitted by officials, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and marriage parties. The colonial regime brought industrial technology: the printing press and then, more significant for ordinary people, the post office, the telegraph and the railway. These three, all government run, became the greatest employers in the country. When Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964, seventeen years after independence, Indian Post and Telegraphs employed more than 400,000 people, ran close to 90,000 post offices and carried more than 4.8 billion items of mail a year, roughly ten pieces of mail for every person. Indian Railways employed 1.2 million people and carried 500,000 passengers a day. Telephones, however, barely found a place in these statistics of communication. In 1964, there were about 580,000 phones for a population of 465 million people—roughly one phone for every 800 Indians.
⁴⁹

Communication was slow and patchy in these post-independence years. Newspaper circulations began to grow strongly only from the 1980s. Until 1979, daily newspapers in English sold more copies than those in any Indian language, including Hindi, the official language used by more than 40 per cent of the population. Radio was still closely controlled by government. In the early 1960s, 20 per cent of programming consisted of classical vocal and instrumental music. Radio required electricity. Battery radios were large and expensive until the arrival of the transistor. When Nehru died, a population of 440 million had 3.6 million radios—one for every 120 people.
⁵⁰
Television did not become an all-India medium until the Asian Games of 1982.
⁵¹

Even in 1991, 57 per cent of India could not
read or write. Most people communicated through the spoken word sometimes mediated by people reading aloud or by listening to cassette tapes which had become available for entertainment and for political purposes from the 1970s.
⁵²
The postcard was the closest the majority of people came to communicating over distance. The basic postcard cost 6 pies in 1953 (one-32nd of a rupee or half a US cent) and rose only slightly to 50 paise (half a rupee or one US cent) in the twenty-first century.
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Postcards conveyed essential news, written, if one were illiterate, by a professional writer or a literate neighbour, as Shyam Benegal’s popular Hindi film
Welcome to Sajjanpur
(2008) wryly captured.
⁵⁴

The postcard was a wonderful device. It allowed cheap communication, but for illiterate or semi-literate people it required intermediaries, and it was slow, uncertain and open to prying eyes and sabotage. Its heyday was probably in the 1960s and 1970s when the volume of posted items grew strongly. The post office reached a peak when it carried 7.4 billion items annually at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but as the mobile phone spread, postal volumes fell—by more than 10 per cent between 2004–05 and 2008–09.
⁵⁵

Table 1.2: Items carried by Indian Posts, 2004–05 to 2008–09.

Source: Department of Posts,
Annual Report
(new Delhi: Department of Posts, india, for relevant years).

The national elites, who ran
India after independence, proclaimed Gandhian values. The telephone, like television and even radio, was regarded either as a luxury or as an item for the strategic use of the state, similar to the
dak
(postal system) of the Mughal empire. An advertisement for Bharat Electronics (BEL) in 1964 reflected this attitude. Headlined ‘The Message That Saved His Life’, it drew on the patriotism and fears of the disastrous 1962 border war with China and showed a soldier making a call on a enormous radio-telephone while colleagues carried a stretcher towards a helicopter. The copy read:

He was wounded seriously in one of the forward posts. The nearest hospital was 30 miles away. A message was flashed by means of a BEL-made high frequency transceiver … The life of yet another of the nation’s brave sons was saved! … BEL is geared up to meet the nation’s needs.
⁵⁶

The wounded soldier of the advertisement was lucky: had he been injured in a village accident, thirty miles would have been the likely distance to the nearest telephone, much less the nearest hospital.

The elite nature of the Indian state after independence was not surprising. Caste and colonialism were complementary. Though independent India happily embraced elections, law codes, egalitarian rhetoric and the anonymous intimacies of railway travel, the country remained highly stratified, and holders of political power came from a tiny segment of society.
⁵⁷
The practice of untouchability was banned in Article 17 of the constitution of 1950: ‘“Untouchability” is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden’. But Article 17 collided with the ancient texts that promised molten metal in the ear and the cutting out of tongues for low-status people who listened to or passed on high-status knowledge.
⁵⁸
Long-standing social practice and prejudice wrestled with ‘modern’ law after 1947. Affirmative action—‘reservation’ as it was dubbed in India—provided seats in legislatures for Scheduled Castes (‘untouchables’) and Scheduled Tribes, as well as places in schools and colleges and in government jobs. Similar reservation of government jobs was created for Other Backward Classes (OBCs). More than sixty per cent of the population of India was made up of people who did not belong to higher castes.