Analysis: Mobile phones are the great leveller

ONE of my favourite photographs shows a Hindu sadhu right out of central casting – naked body, long matted hair and beard, ash-smeared forehead, rudraksha-mala around his neck, the works – chatting away on a mobile phone.

The contrast says so much about the land of paradoxes that is today’s India, a country that lives in several centuries at the same time.

When I left in 1975 to go to the United States for graduate studies, there were 600 million Indians and just two million land-line telephones. Having a phone was a rare privilege: if you were not an important government official, a doctor or a journalist, you might languish on a long waiting list and never receive one. MPs had the right to allocate 15 phone connections to whomever they deemed worthy.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

As late as 1984, when an MP rose to protest the frequent telephone breakdowns and the woeful performance by a public-sector monopoly, the then communications minister replied in a lordly manner. In a developing country, he declared, telephones are a luxury, not a right; the government had no obligation to provide better service; and any Indian who was not satisfied with the service could return his phone, since there was an eight-year waiting list.

Now fast-forward to today. In the first edition of my book The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, I reported that, in April 2007, India set a new world record by selling seven million mobile phones in one month.

By the time the book in theshops, that figure was already out of date. And in 2010, India sold 20 million mobile phones three months in a row.

India has now overtaken the US as the world’s second-largest phone market, with 857 million SIM cards in circulation and an estimated 600 million individual users. China has more, but India is ahead in phones per capita, is adding them faster and is projected to overtake China before the end of this year.

I am not merely celebrating a triumph for India’s capitalists. What is wonderful about the “mobile miracle” is that it has accomplished something our socialist policies proclaimed but did little to achieve – it empowered the less fortunate. The beneficiaries are not just the affluent, but people who in the old days would not have dreamed even of joining the dreaded waiting lists.

It is a source of delight to me to find mobile phones in the hands of the unlikeliest of my fellow citizens: taxi drivers, paan wallahs, farmers and fishermen.

Recently, I visited the country farm of a friend in Kerala. He asked if I wanted fresh coconut water; I said yes, and he pulled out his phone and dialled the local toddy tapper. A voice replied: “I’m here.” We looked up and there he was, on top of the nearest coconut tree, with his lungi tied up at his knees, a hatchet in one hand and a phone in the other.

The mobile has empowered the Indian underclass in ways that 45 years of talk about socialism singularly failed to do. In the new India, communication has become the great leveller.

• Shashi Tharoor, a member of India’s parliament, was foreign affairs secretary in 2009-10.