Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (21 page)

Sita, the young woman who attended to Doron, assured him that the phone would be fixed and ready for pickup by 6 that evening. Doron went next to the cashier, also a woman, for payment; then he lodged a few more forms. On the way out, he noticed a shrine with a photograph of the proprietor’s guru, adorned with fresh flowers. Beside it stood a medium-sized, sparkling and well-filtered fish tank with several goldfish. By the door, next to the security guard, a large white board asked: ‘Has Nokia made you smile today?’ On the upper left corner, a blue-boxed caption proclaimed: ‘Nokia: India’s most trusted brand’. The board had magnetic yellow ‘happy faces’ on it, under which customers placed feedback notes, many in English, others in Hindi. Many were satisfied, but others were not so happy with the ‘Nokia Care’ experience.

Outside, the steamy heat, noise and pollution of Banaras startled Doron back into an older India after what had seemed like a satisfying experience with the new, improved, big-brand India that Nokia and global capitalism had brought. Little did he know that he would be returning to Nokia Care three more times that week. Each time, he was told the phone would be ready tomorrow. On the third visit, Doron took the phone back and presented it to a street-based
mistrii
. In a few hours, the
mistrii
confirmed the Nokia diagnosis that a new motherboard was required—and Doron chose to buy a cheap China Mobile from the grey market in Banaras’ Daal Mandi.

Doron’s experience dramatised choices forced on an owner of a mobile phone. The sleek Nokia Centre or the dusty turmoil of the bazaar? The sanitised customer-care centres were similar to multinational chain stores all over the world and a testimony to the homogenising effects of globalisation. Banaras, the most famous city of the Hindu faith, got its first McDonald’s in 2005. But the spread of global capitalism was not one-dimensional. Homogenisation of practices proceeded unevenly and was shaped by local conditions and preferences.
³⁸
Certain values, ideologies and modes of conduct, however, bore the marks of global modernity. The belief that individuals have equal rights and responsibilities regardless of their place in society was one such idea. In the case of Nokia Care, this translated into the idea of a first-come-first-served, carefully managed, queue.

As mobile phones made
wider and deeper inroads into Indian society, engagement with the corporate world spread beyond the upper classes. As well as queues, places such as Nokia Care stressed customer satisfaction and loyalty to a corporate identity. Customers of all classes became socialised into the technical and social practices of a consumer-driven world. These practices required acceptance (if not adoption) of new modes of being in the world, such as embracing the behaviour of the queue, interacting with strangers who had only one transactional role in a person’s life and acquiring rights and obligations by contract. This ‘individuating’ experience contrasted with a more ‘relational’ mode of being bound by family relations, status, duty and obligations with known individuals, rather than
abstract
rights and contracts.
³⁹
At the most obvious level, the mobile-phone experience was profoundly individual: one person usually talks to another person. But the cell-phone experience introduced another set of mechanisms, which implicated people in a range of transactions: to acquire first a phone, then a service provider, to top up its prepaid talk-time and later, to have a phone fixed when it failed. The experience of Nokia Care conditioned people to ‘appropriate’ forms of behaviour as consumers.

Middle-class people could use both older methods, found among the
mistriis
and in the grey markets, and the new ways of the Nokia Care experience. Doron recounted his phone-repair experience to a friend named Sunil. The conversation was illuminating.

SUNIL: When my phone broke I took it to the Sony service centre. The person at the counter told me that to fix this model they’ll need to import the part and it will be very costly and would take more than two weeks. I did not have the time or money for this so I decided to take it to the
mistrii
.

AD: What did you think about needing to wait in line at the care centre?

SUNIL: There was a queue
there too, but all the places are like this. These companies come from the West, and like any civilized society in the West they have queues, things that need to be organized, with numbers. But the Nokia Care centre is the best one. They are the biggest mobile company in India. Here in India I don’t have to queue because relations (
sambandh
) here are more personal. You see, in India more work can be done through personal connections (
Bhaarat mein zyaadaatar kaam niji sambandhon se hota hai
).

AD: What do you mean?

SUNIL: If you have good relations with the shop owner or with the repair wala, your mobile will be fixed first. If not, then you will have a bit of trouble and you will need to wait until your number comes up.

AD: So when you left the Sony service centre where did you go to fix your mobile?

SUNIL: I went to one boy I know in my
mohalla
(neighbourhood). He deals with second-hand mobiles and also repairs them. He checked my mobile and said he couldn’t repair it himself, as it looked like a major problem. So he said he’d take it to Daal Mandi and let me know the problem and cost by that evening. He later called to tell me that it would cost around Rs 700 to repair because it was a problem with the ‘motherboard’, and it would be ready the next day. My father was upset and said I should not let the
mistriis
in Daal Mandi fix my mobile because they replace the good parts with used ones. But I decided to do it anyway and the mobile was repaired. They replaced the screen and did software formating too. But probably because they had an older version which did not match my mobile, some features like my camera and torch still don’t work well.

Sunil is an upper-caste, lower-middle-class man in his early thirties. People of his status have more choice than the poor about where they might take their mobiles for maintenance and repair. They run a risk: once the seal is broken and the handset is tinkered with in an unauthorised setting, service centres refuse to honour a warranty and refuse to fix the phone—as Doron was informed when he mentioned such an option on one of his visits to Nokia Care.
⁴⁰
Sunil seemed comfortable in both environments. While the branded service centre was his first port of call, he did not shy away from the street-repair economy. People like Sunil were able to benefit from the two seemingly distinct modes of repair: formal and informal.
⁴¹

Service centres socialised
consumers and introduced new practices and knowledge in other ways. The receipt that a customer received at the end of a transaction reinforced ideas about contracts. With that in hand, customers could be expected to feel relieved and reassured, guaranteed of Nokia’s international standards and confirmed in their own participation in the ‘global hierarchy of value’.
⁴²
Even the feedback mechanism, which in the street-side economy was based on word-of-mouth, in Nokia Care was replaced by the notes attached to a board by smiley-faced magnets. Such forms of feedback were intended to give clients a sense of connection in their dealings with an impersonal institution like a multi-national corporation. Having one’s mobile repaired in a Nokia Care centre might not have been as quick or convenient as getting it fixed at the local street-repair shop, but it promised certainty and accountability.

The ‘choreography of modern consumerism’ was attractive to middle-class consumers, though it tended to alienate and intimidate lower socio-economic classes, such as the boatmen Doron knew. They never visited such places. This was not to say they were unaware of what a warranty meant or that they did not own brand-name phones. But the informal sector offered more possibilities, both materially and symbolically, and with fewer restrictions.

India brought its own
cultural and material conditions to global fashion and planned obsolescence. Across the world, the average consumer was said to replace a handset every twelve months, and India’s middle classes felt similar pressures and temptations of consumer capitalism. But deeply engrained frugality, and widespread poverty, meant that large numbers of fashion-conscious young people turned to India’s long-standing practices of repair (and recycling) to satisfy the itch for newer and flashier phones. They embraced the burgeoning second-hand market, especially in the area of smart phones. These second-hand phones could be found in Delhi’s grey markets and other more formal shops across the country. The latter even offered limited warranty on secondhand purchases for consumers eager to update to a newer model but unable to buy the latest Nokia, HTC or iPhone. Not surprisingly, this appetite for the second-hand smart phones also made its mark on the internet. Sites for the selling and purchasing of such mobiles, generally handsets no older than a year, became increasingly popular across Indian cyberspace. For many among the poor, the ‘unofficial’ realm was where the majority of people still went to buy and repair their mobile devices—just as Doron ended up doing.

As Henry Ford discovered in the 1920s, it was difficult to bring the practices of the factory floor to the specific needs of impatient consumers. However, what the automobile industry did in the United States and Europe in the twentieth century was repeated in some ways by the mobile-phone industry in India in the twenty-first. The unpredictable cascade of jobs that a desirable, mass-produced item generated brought new kinds of formal and informal employment to millions of people. The process could promote fundamental changes in cultural practices, such as more women in public, dressed differently, interacting with male customers and wielding authority by taking money and validating forms. The mechanics of the mobile also brought millions of people into closer relations with governments, corporations and bureaucracies. It was difficult to have a phone without filling in a form. The mechanics of the mobile included the practices that people had to learn in order to get a phone and make it work. Once consumers had been inducted into such practices, a multitude of uses suggested
themselves, as the following chapters explore.

PART THREE

CONSUMING

5

FOR BUSINESS

There is relatively little evidence for the assertion that mobiles help people start new businesses.

Jonathan Donner and Marcela X. Escobari,

Journal of International Development

Celebrations
of the mobile phone
as a tool for the economic
benefit of the poor are
common. Sometimes they are well founded.
¹
Mass availability of mobile phones, Peter O’Neill predicted in 2003, ‘will lead to economic expansion from the bottom up, in part because direct information for marketing can eliminate the urban, middlemen market-makers’.
²
A study conducted throughout India from 2006 to 2008 found that states with higher mobile-phone penetration had more rapid growth in State Domestic Product (SDP). For every increase of 10 per cent in mobile penetration, SDP was said to grow by 1.2 per cent. The study suggested that when one out of every four people in a state had a mobile phone, significantly higher economic growth was achieved. ‘The growth dividend of [the] mobile is substantial’, the authors concluded.
³
The same study was more muted about the benefits farmers derived from mobile phones: ‘mobile phones … are starting to deliver agricultural productivity improvements’.
⁴

The benefits to workers in many old-style jobs are easy to imagine and to see. Vegetable sellers, who for eighty years pedalled bicycles through residential streets crying their wares (and for generations before that had carried the baskets on their own shoulders or on the backs of donkeys), increasingly took orders by phone and delivered to the householder’s door. Time, energy and waste were saved. Similarly, day labourers and artisans of all kinds found work—and were found by employers—quicker and easier. (See
Illus. 19
). But to what extent did the mobile phone really change the capacity of poorer people to work more profitably and effectively? And did mobile phones enable people previously excluded from profitable economic activity to find new ways to earn a living?

A survey of small
businesses in a few cities in 2008 found eleven different occupations relying on mobile phones. Two were the products of the phone itself—they used the mobile phone to pass on advertising messages and record information for marketing of products. Another had created a labour exchange for manual workers, based on the mobile phone. A worker with a phone could become a member and thereby be connected with the agency and matched with suitable work. Once connected to the system, workers were helped to sign up for basic bank accounts and to take courses to improve their skills and qualifications. Taxis, rickshaw drivers and waste-paper dealers—random, catch-as-catch-can services in earlier times—had embraced mobiles phones enthusiastically. (See
Illus. 23
). Examples came from across the country. In a vegetable and fish market in Panaji in Goa in 2010, for example, the owner of a small vegetable stall received orders from regular customers by phone and prepared the order for customers to pick up later. For trusted customers, the owner delivered to the door, and while he was absent, his two employees from Bihar operated the stall. He supplied them with one mobile phone, but he made sure that it could take only incoming calls. There was to be no idle chattering to distant Bihar at his expense.
⁵