The mobile phone is perhaps the most disruptive, widely available device in history, and nowhere has it expanded faster than in India. Everyone’s heard of the big-time crooks who made millions from shady deals to capture spectrum at bargain rates. And everyone’s heard of the panicky village councils that decree no woman should own a phone lest she get up to independent mischief.
But what we don’t hear much about is how the rapid expansion came about. Who has heard, for example, of someone like Dilip Kumar (not his real name), who helped bring the cell phone to the people and inducted the masses into the wonders of wireless communication?
Tens of thousands of people like him are the missionaries of the mobile who have put cheap phones into the hands of more than 600 million people in India. (900 million if we were to take the figures of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India at face value).
Mr Kumar was one of many, educated, lower-middle-class young men in Uttar Pradesh who was desperately searching for work. Keenly interested in gadgets, he got a job as a salesman in the growing business of mobile phones where he became a classic example: have phone, will travel. He moved around the state selling phones and learning and teaching the art of capitalist retail. He, and people like him became the worker-bees of global capitalism, dedicated promoters and also enthusiastic consumers.
The high priests in this process are the big companies like Reliance, Idea, Nokia and Vodafone and the advertising agencies they employ. Huge ad-spends carried the good news about the wonders of cell phones first to city dwellers and then to towns and villages. But, for these top-down advertising campaigns to succeed, there had to be mobile-phone missionaries on the ground and spreading the word. They educated new consumers and taught them how to fill in the forms, press the buttons and connect themselves to global capitalism, the state and their cousin-brother in a distant town.
Marketing departments trained thousands of sellers and sales promoters. This was no mean feat. There was nothing natural about wanting to have a mobile phone: the technology was alien and calls were expensive. The process to build infrastructure and create demand involved trial, error and millions of dollars invested in what was still an unknown future for mobile telephony in an India where a government provider ruled the roost.
But as the canny Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry has known for years, to sell goods in India you must reach hundreds of thousands of small shopkeepers. That’s where the mobile-phone industry found some of its evangelists. SIM cards and pre-paid recharge coupons soon found prime shelf space alongside shampoo, toothpaste and laundry detergent, the everyday commodities essential for households.
Mobile phones created jobs in manufacturing, distribution, maintenance and repair. In 2007, 2.5 million people were estimated to be employed in the ‘telecom service industry’ but this figure did not include the most innovative mobile mechanics of all — those doing repairs and second-hand sales in small shops in every town in the country.
In the unforgiving environment of Indian towns and countryside, cell phones broke. A repair industry emerged. The premises varied from slick shop-fronts to roadside stalls that were only slightly more elaborate than those of the repairmen who once fixed bicycles. Like a roadside barber, the repairmen groomed and revitalised the cell phones of people with limited funds and limited access to the Internet. They replaced hardware and reformatted software, inserted music and downloaded screen-savers featuring gods, WWF wrestlers and Bollywood stars. They also brought cheap, full-colour, small-screen pornography to the masses.
Saif and his brother-in-law were mobile phone mistris in the heart of Lucknow. Throughout the day they engaged in “grooming,” fixing and adjusting all types of handsets for people off the street. The transaction was straightforward. He and his partner sat behind the counter and interacted with their customers, who stood on the pavement, sometimes inspecting the devices on display in their very-mini showroom. The customers explained the fault, and asked for a quick evaluation. The most common faults, he said, included connectivity problems and screen or recharging faults caused by moisture. The moisture problem was solved by prying open the phone and dipping the motherboard in a bucket of foul-smelling chemicals that stood next to his bare feet. A toothbrush was used to clean and dry the board before reassembly. Charging about Rs 100 to fix the most common faults, the two partners earned on average Rs 800-1,000 a day.
These wayside operations contrasted with the slick corporate centres, set up by big companies, which introduced people to the practices of global consumerism. This repair-economy of mobile phones extended the lives of handsets and created a cheap, second-hand market. The small-time repair economy offered poor people a status-laden consumer good and turned them into participants in a global system.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks made ‘Peace, Land and Bread’ the slogan of revolution. Indian political parties have played on ‘Roti, Kapda aur Makaan’ (‘Bread, Clothing and Shelter’) for a couple of generations. But one of India’s shrewdest capitalists (and a late-comer to the mobile phone business) coined the slogan that captures India’s cell-phone revolution — ‘Bread, Clothing, Shelter — and a Mobile’ (Roti, kapra, makaan aur mobile). That’s a slogan the sales people, secondhand dealers and repair walas — the missionaries of the mobile — have made their own.
Assa Doron is a Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra and co-author with Robin Jeffrey of Cell Phone Nation (Hachette, 2013)
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