T N Ninan: It's super-phone!

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

It is simplistic, and often delusional, to seek quick technological fixes for complex social, economic and organisational challenges. Still, the prospects held out for making life easier for millions because of the rapid spread of mobile phones (150 million, at last count) are exciting""especially when you compare that figure with some other numbers. India's largest bank has about 10,000 branches. The post office network has over 100,000 offices. And the country has some 15 million people who own and use credit cards. In short, there is no network of any kind that can count up to 150 million, or anything remotely approaching that number.

The exciting prospect being held out now, as three reports in Business Standard this past week have spelt out, is that a mobile phone need not just be an instrument to help you talk to someone at the other end of the city, country or world. It can be a tool for doing many other things as well, if combined with other technologies that have now been developed and are being tested for their operational usefulness in real-life situations. For instance, it can help you transfer money, withdraw it, keep a ready balance on tap (i.e. go shopping), and so on. In other words, it can be like a credit/debit card, or a bank. It is easy to use because all that is required is to swipe it close to another attachment. It is cheap because the cost of a transaction is the price of a short message on the mobile network. It is presumably safe because of the encryption technologies that are used. And it can be near universal in its reach because, very soon, more Indians will have mobile phones than bank accounts.

The benefits are obvious, too. The post office charges as much as 5 per cent for transferring money via money order to a remote village, and the money can take weeks to reach. Western Union may charge less for remitting money from Dubai to a Gujarat village, but neither can compete with the cost that a mobile phone enables. Nor can they compete with its speed (instant transfer), and convenience""since mobile phone companies have agents everywhere who have a store of cash because they are taking it from customers. If there are six million Indians in West Asia who send money home periodically, and may sometimes need to transfer it to meet a family emergency back home, think of the convenience.

All of this sounds dramatic, but the technology is quite simple. For the heart of the mobile phone is an electronic chip that can be programmed as you wish, and all that needs to be added on is the facility to read and transfer data in a near-field situation. After that, the only limitation is the imagination required to think of new applications, and the organisational ability to translate an idea into a business. There are other limitations, of course, but these are man-made and can be addressed""because you have to change the rules that were made in a pre-digital age (does the phone company need a licence to operate in this fashion, and what kind of licence?).

Chandrababu Naidu, when he was chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, thought up the e-seva system for helping ordinary citizens handle simple inter-face with the government""to pay house tax, get a driving licence, and so on. It was a good idea, but there are only that many e-seva kiosks. The central government is now setting up electronic kiosks to help administer many of its mass-benefit programmes in the fields of employment, education and the like. It is not hard to see how the mobile phone can be used for many of the same purposes, at lower cost and with far greater reach. So while all this does sound like a techie dream of using large-system applications to address fundamental issues, the truth seems to be that all this is not only plausible but may become reality quite soon.