Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (22 page)

Mobile phones drew less obvious enterprises into the larger processes of small-scale capitalism, as the case of Ranjeet Gupta, a henna artist, vividly illustrated. In north India, Pakistan and north Africa, women inscribe elaborate patterns on their hands and feet as decoration before auspicious events such as weddings. Henna is the plant that provides the coloured powder and paste used to draw the patterns. Gupta began his career on the pavements of west Delhi in 1999 where poorer women would sit on a stool while he decorated their palms for a small sum. ‘He was’, the researchers noted, ‘harassed by officials since pavement businesses were technically illegal, although popular’. In 2002, he got a cell phone (when the researchers met him in 2008, he had two). ‘His clients now call him’. His business by this time involved his being booked to visit people’s homes to apply henna; the customers were wealthier and the designs more elaborate. When the researchers met him, he had also gone into the training business and offered five-week courses to aspiring henna artists for Rs 3,000 (a month’s salary for a basic low-end wage earner at the time).
⁶

The tiny businesses that embraced the mobile phone drew their owners deeper into the arms of the modern state. To begin with, one could not legally get a SIM card without filling out a form, attaching a photograph and being provided with a phone number.
⁷
(See
Illus. 20
). The form itself required the applicant to provide a permanent address as well as personal details that the service provider was supposed to verify. These requirements also applied to the handset which had to have an IMEI registration number. After the attack on Mumbai by phone-carrying murderers in November 2008 (
Chapter 8
), these requirements were applied more strictly, and users and companies who tried to circumvent them were subject to heavy fines.

Many users of mobile
phones had never had a bank account. Getting a phone, however, gave them an identity number through their phone, linked them to bureaucratic systems of record-keeping and forced them to keep track of their use and their phone payments. The phone was disciplining or educating them about the requirements of modern worlds. Their movements could also be monitored, and they in turn could keep track of others more closely than ever before. Homesick Bihari employees, for example, could yearn to make a call back home, and, at the same time, they could be checked up on by their absent boss whenever he wished.

None of these processes is new. For 200 years, as rural Indians have been absorbed into the offices and factories of expanding cities, people have been exposed to bureaucracy, discipline and homesickness, along with widened opportunities and new perils. The cheap pocket watch, and later the wrist watch, were handy devices for enforcing punctuality on
workers. The cheap mobile phone, however, made things happen faster, more widely and more intrusively—and for more people—than any similar personal device. And it let people talk back and reach out as never before. The mobile phone quickly became an integral part of everyday life, especially for those small businesses that had little access to wider markets and whose business often entailed danger, such as the fishermen of Kerala.

On the sea …

For a time, they may have been the most famous fishermen and women in the world, the low-caste, hard-scrabble fisherfolk of Kerala who began to appear in journalists’ accounts and economists’ research papers from about the year 2000. Fishing in Kerala was a low-status occupation: fisherfolk were ‘historically branded as outcasts’.
⁸
The people who fish, whether Hindus, Muslims or Christians, were seen as working in an unsavoury occupation. They killed living creatures, dealt in a smelly product and faced great risks from bad weather and the perils of the sea. They were early adopters of the mobile phone, and their story illustrated the technology’s possibilities to make lives safer, surer and more prosperous.

One of the first of these stories appeared in the
New York Times
in August 2001. ‘In the seas … off the coast of southern India’, Saritha Rai wrote, ‘the steady drone of motorized fishing boats is often interrupted by the ringing of mobile phones’. Rai described how the owner of a trawler based near Kochi in Kerala had got a mobile phone a year earlier and ‘doubled’ his profits by being able to compare prices at different harbours before landing his catch. ‘Life without a mobile phone’, her informant tells her, ‘is unthinkable’.
⁹
Another American journalist, Kevin Sullivan, described his time on a 74-foot trawler off the Kerala coast a few years later. The captain dropped his nets, and within minutes his cell phone began to ring. Agents onshore had heard that he had found a shoal of fish and were ringing to bid for the catch. ‘When I have a big catch’, the skipper told Sullivan, ‘the phone rings 60 or 70 times before I get to port’. The journalist concluded that the cell phone ‘meant greater access to markets, more information about prices and new customers for tens of millions of Indian farmers and fishermen’.
¹⁰

From 2001 Kerala’s fisherfolk and their mobile phones
figured in dozens of studies and newspaper reports, including a seminal essay by Robert Jensen, an American economist. Published in 2007, Jensen’s study lent academic rigour to the widely discussed impressions that mobile phones were particularly good for fishermen. Jensen found that from 1997 when mobile phones were introduced in Kerala, the construction of transmission towers very soon allowed mobile signals to be received up to 25 kilometres (15 miles) out to sea, and within four years—by the time Rai wrote her piece for the
New York Times
—’over 60 per cent of fishing boats and most wholesale and retail traders were using mobile phones to coordinate sales’.
¹¹
The results were better prices for fishermen, more stable prices for consumers (which in the past had fluctuated widely when some landing areas received more catches than there were buyers and others, more buyers than fish), and ‘the complete elimination of waste’.
¹²
‘Overall’, Jensen concluded, ‘the fisheries sector was transformed from a collection of essentially autarkic fishing markets to a state of nearly perfect spatial arbitrage’: that is, the mobile phone allowed fish to find buyers and buyers to find fish. Profits increased yet prices fell.
¹³
By 2008, it was estimated that up to 100,000 people associated with fishing in Kerala had mobile phones.
¹⁴

Jensen’s study was picked up by researchers, journalists and teachers around the world, including C. K. Prahalad’s best-selling
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
and the hard-headed British weekly the
Economist
.
¹⁵
The latter welcomed the study for adding rigorous research and grassroots experience to a wealth of anecdotes and a number of macro-studies about the economic benefits of mobile telephony. The best known of the big studies suggested that an increase of 10 per cent in the penetration of mobile phones in a region added about 0.5 per cent to Gross Domestic Product.
¹⁶
Working people quickly realised the benefits, the
Economist
contended, and ‘fishermen, carpenters and porters are willing to pay for the service because it increases their profits’. And it all happened without governments. Mobile phone networks were run by private operators ‘because they make a profit’.
¹⁷

Kerala’s fishermen offered a particularly picturesque example of the positive aspects of the mobile phone. (See
Illus. 21
). A beautiful coastline, a nutritious product and a dangerous industry provided the background for accounts of the benefits of the technology. From the perspective of a fishing boat on a choppy
sea, a fisherman told a reporter that ‘the two crucial changes’ had happened to fishing in his lifetime: ‘the inboard motor and the mobile phone’. From the ivory tower of business studies, C. K. Prahalad said that ‘one element of poverty is the lack of information. The cell phone gives poor people as much information as the middleman’.
¹⁸
As well as allowing fishermen at sea to discover where best to land their catches, their mobile phones kept them informed of changing weather conditions, allowed them to alert friends on other boats to substantial shoals of fish and enabled them to call for help if a boat ran into trouble or to head for shore if there were family emergencies on land.
¹⁹

The dirt, the dangers, and the disparities of fishing in Kerala, and elsewhere in the world, have been well known for a long time. In
Chemmeen
[prawn], the most famous novel and film about Kerala’s fishing people, the role of middlemen as exploiters of poor fisherfolk is central. ‘“You can take your fish back!” the big trader said’, when the desperate fisherman tried to sell at an unfavourable moment.
²⁰
Fishing in Kerala provides a parable for many small-scale occupations that embrace the mobile phone. The mobile improves the odds for poor people against power-holders; but it does not even the odds. Take, for example, the boat that the
Washington Post
journalist Kevin Sullivan went to sea on: a 74-footer (22.5 metres) with a crew of more than 30.
²¹
The boat represented a huge investment by the standards of ordinary fishing families along the coast, and even the cost of diesel to run its engines amounted to many days’ labour for old-style fishermen working from small catamarans. Mobile phones allowed big boats to cover more territory at sea and scoop up more fish. The increased safety provided through weather reports emboldened big boats to move farther afield even during the monsoon. Fishing during the monsoon had been a controversial issue on the Kerala coast from the 1980s when movements of small fisherfolk, sometimes led by activist Catholic priests and nuns, forced governments to limit perceived overfishing. By these measurements, however, the gap between big boat owners and smaller players could be seen as remaining the same, if not widening, with the arrival of mobile phones. And the increased intensity of fishing could deplete the long-term stock of fish.

Caution and nuance are essential if we are to understand the downs as well as the ups that the technology brings. The tales of the Kerala fishermen, vivid for their positives, also provide
apt cautions against going too far in celebration of the potential of mobile telephony. The autonomy of the mobile made fishermen of all sizes safer, less wasteful of their catch and less exposed to wide fluctuations in price. The mobile also, according to one account, reinforced long-standing tendencies among the men who go to sea to cooperate rather than compete. ‘The availability of mobile technologies’, Sreekumar writes, ‘has amplified this impulse and enabled new modes of cooperation’.
²²
The key point of course is that the technology reinforced and extended practices, rather than created them.
²³
The mobile did not alter class relations, yet much of the writing about cell phones and fisherfolk overlooked the difference between the 74-foot diesel-powered trawler fishing 20 miles offshore and the two-man catamaran working within sight of land. The phone allowed the owners of big boats to fish more widely, efficiently and constantly, and the toll of increased fishing on fish stocks was hotly debated. Similarly, though the phone allowed price comparison at different harbours while still at sea, it also allowed traders on shore to keep in touch with each other, maintain solidarity and keep prices low.
²⁴
The power of the middleman ‘has lessened somewhat… the fishermen get the opportunity to drive a harder bargain than before’.
²⁵
The mobile phone improved some conditions; it did not reorder society.

Around the globe …

The fisherfolk of Kerala provided dramatic, widely known examples. Evidence from around the world confirms aspects of the Kerala story but adds the rider that culture and practice adapt technical innovation to local ways. The American scholar, Jonathan Donner, one of the outstanding analysts of mobile technology, and his colleague Marcela Escobari, provided a revealing examination of mobile telephony and small-scale businesses around the developing world, ranging from the Caribbean and Africa to India. Two of their findings are particularly significant for attempts to understand the impact of mobile phones for small enterprises in India.

First, the Donner and Escobari inquiry found that mobile phones seldom led to the development of
new
businesses. Much of the impressionistic writing about mobile phones tended to
see the phone as a key by which people previously excluded from ways of earning their livings were enabled to do so. The evidence, however, generated a string of negatives. Research did not confirm uplifting stories of new jobs created by new people. Just as there was no evidence that people who were not previously fisherfolk got into the fishing business in Kerala when mobile phones made it safer and more efficient, new people had not created
new
enterprises elsewhere. ‘There is relatively little evidence for the assertion that mobiles help people start new businesses’.
²⁶
Another of the veteran authorities on mobile telephony was similarly surprised in a study in Jamaica. ‘The phone is used much less amongst low-income Jamaicans in connection with either jobs or entrepreneurship than we anticipated’, wrote Heather Horst and Daniel Miller.
²⁷