India's underclass gets upwardly mobile

India's underclass gets upwardly mobile
6 Apr 2008, 0016 hrs IST,Shashi Tharoor for TIMES OF INDIA

Recently, i visited the country farm of a friend in Kerala. It was in a rural area near the Trivandrum backwaters, some 20 kilometres away from anything you'd consider urban. My friend asked if i wanted fresh coconut water. I said yes, and he pulled out his cellphone and dialled a number. A voice replied "I'm here". We looked up, and there was the local toddy tapper, on top of the nearest coconut tree, with his lungi tied up at his knees, a hatchet in one hand and a cellphone in the other. He brought the coconuts down, we had a refreshing drink, and i marvelled once again at what the cellphone revolution has wrought in our country.

As some readers know, my most recent book is called The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone. It is a book about the transformation of India, and two-thirds of the title is perhaps self-explanatory; I begin the book with a Panchatantra-type fable (which first appeared in this newspaper) about India as a lumbering, slumbering, ponderous elephant, mired in its own dust and mud, covered in flies, slow to move, slow to change, which in recent years has appeared to be acquiring the stripes of an agile, lithe and sinewy tiger. But the third element of the title comes in because to me the cellphone is the instrument that most epitomises this change.

I grew up in an India in which telephones were both rare and virtually useless. When i left India in 1975 to go to the US for graduate studies, we had perhaps 600 million residents in the country and just two million land-line telephones. Having a telephone was a rare privilege: if you weren't an important government official, or a doctor, or a journalist, you might languish in a long waiting-list and never receive a phone. Telephones were such a rarity (after all, 90% of the population had no access to a telephone line) that elected members of Parliament had amongst their privileges the right to allocate 15 telephone connections to whomever they deemed worthy.

And if you did have a phone, it wasn't necessarily a blessing. I spent my high school years in Calcutta, and i remember that if you picked up your phone, you had no guarantee you would get a dial tone; if you got a dial tone and dialled a number, you had no guarantee you would reach the number you had dialled. Sometimes you were connected to someone else's ongoing conversation, and they had no idea you were able to hear them; there was even a technical term for it, the 'cross-connection' (appropriately, since these were connections that made us very cross). If you wanted to call another city, say Delhi, you had to book a 'trunk call' in the morning and then sit by the telephone all day waiting for it to come through; or you could pay eight times the going rate for a 'lightning call' which only took half an hour instead of the usual three or four or more to be connected. As late as 1984, when a member of Parliament rose to protest this woeful, appalling performance by a public sector monopoly, the then communications minister replied in a lordly manner that in a developing country, telephones were a luxury, not a right; that the government had no obligation to provide better service; and that if the honourable member was not satisfied with his telephone, he was welcome to return it, since there was an eight-year waiting list for this supposedly inadequate instrument!

Now fast-forward to today. When i finished writing my book, i was able to report in it that in April 2007, India had just set a new world record by selling seven million cellphones that month, more than any country (including the US and China) had ever done in one month in the history of telecommunications. Well, the book went off to the press, got printed and bound and arrived in your bookstores, and that figure is already out of date — because in each of the last three months, India has been breaking its own world record, and last month it sold 8.3 million cellphones. So, today in one month India sells four times as many phones as the entire country possessed three decades ago. Attitudes have also changed, from that of the old communications minister to that of today's enlightened Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, a model of its kind.

But most important of all, as my story of the toddy-tapper confirms, is the issue of who carries these cellphones in today's India. For the cellphones are now in the hands of people who would not have presumed, a generation ago, to put themselves on those eight-year-long waiting-lists. If you are chauffeur-driven these days, you can be sure that your driver carries a cellphone. If you visit a friend in a Delhi suburb, the istri wallah on the side-streets — with his wooden cart, using a coal-fired steam iron to iron clothes from the neighbourhood — carries a cellphone, to know which apartment needs his services. Farmers carry cellphones; just being able to call the nearest town to find out whether the market is open and what prices are being charged saves a farming family hours of fruitless walking. In Kerala, fisherfolk carry cellphones, so they can call in to the coastal towns after their catch, to know where they should sail to in order to obtain the best prices for their fish.

The cellphone is not a panacea; it will not single-handedly usher in the development that our country has been striving for since Independence. But it is making a huge difference. Above all, it has empowered the Indian underclass in ways in which 45 years of talk about socialism singularly failed to do.