Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (25 page)

Over time, Sujit began accumulating a ‘known passenger’ list of clients on his mobile phone. He developed a
record system the phone’s address book. Pens and paper were not part of Sujit’s work tools, and boatmen of earlier eras were often illiterate. But Sujit’s mobile phone became a data-base (though he did not call it that) on which he kept the phone numbers of rickshaw drivers, tour guides, touts, priests and shops to which he took customers. He thus began to undermine what he viewed as the unfair distribution of resources that benefited the larger ghats. By establishing direct contact with pilgrims and tourists he leapt some of the barriers of the unpredictable tourist and pilgrim trade, such as the inaccessibility of his own ghat and the system that brought the popular ghats the lion’s share of the ‘random’ work. Sujit’s earnings increased.

Mediators still mattered, but boatmen like Sujit now had better access to them through their mobile phones. Though such relationships existed in the past, the mobile phone allowed a boatman to expand his networks and keep them organised. The phone sometimes enabled him to coordinate visits, get more work and earn more money in a day. Boatmen with fewer resources and from smaller
ghats
were able to spread their web further, arrange passenger flow more predictably and no longer be limited to the ‘leftover’ passengers trickling down from the main ghats. The boatmen exemplified aspects of the ‘network societies’ written about by scholars like Manuel Castells, David Singh Grewal and Barry Wellman and alluded to elsewhere in this book.

Such changes needed to be seen in perspective. Sujit was a privileged resident-boatman, not a mere ‘driver’. As such he had rights to own and ply boats from his designated ghat, even if his small ghat had a very limited flow of passengers. Nevertheless, Sujit had the potential to expand his trade with the help of the mobile phone. The ‘drivers’ too could benefit since they were able to get more work if they could be reached easily when jobs came up. Yet the nature of the boating industry was such that most drivers were connected to a specific resident-boatman and territory, as the work demanded a degree of loyalty and constant presence on the ghat in case a stray passenger arrived. The socioeconomic structures of the riverfront economy constrained the movements and earning capacity of the drivers. Moreover, their bosses—resident-boatmen—were able to maintain a close watch on them by using the mobile phone to check on
their actions and whereabouts. The mobile phone could increase one’s autonomy, but at the same time impose new limitations. To appreciate the ambiguous effects of the mobile phone, we need to take account of structures that frame the possibilities for action, and which facilitate or constrain the autonomy of individuals, as the following example illustrates.

For Sujit, the changes brought about by his mobile phone were patchy and piecemeal, not sudden and overwhelming. It would take a long time for him to amass the capital to buy a large enough boat for big groups of pilgrims. He had, however, diversified his clientele and created relationships with both foreign and Indian tourists, many of whom passed on his number to friends on the tourist trail. They in turn contacted Sujit on arrival in Banaras to seek his advice and services. These flow-on effects of mobile communication were hard to measure precisely because they constituted only one variable in a network of socioeconomic considerations. Through the mobile phone, Sujit and other boatmen expanded their networks, created personal ties and coordinated relationships with potential customers and partners. They began to navigate a system that in the past heavily favoured powerful boatmen on larger ghats. The mobile phone by no means eradicated the differences, but it put Sujit on a slightly more equal footing.

Such ‘equalising’ brought costs and generated tensions. As Sujit’s story illustrated, when technology enters a social structure, people make that technology work—they give it meaning within the existing structure. The mobile phone extended the category of ‘known passengers’, which the boatmen had long acknowledged. A boatman could develop a list of ‘known customers’ on his cell phone and arrange to meet them without having to organise meetings face to face. An enterprising boatman from a less frequented ghat could thereby expand his business. But tensions surfaced as competing boatmen sought to safeguard their interests against a technology that potentially undermined their earning capacity.

Boatmen from the larger Assi Ghat spoke of this as a damaging consequence of mobile phones. They expressed frustration at the fact that their ghat had turned into a pick-up point for empty boats coming for passengers who had made arrangements by phone with boatmen from other ghats. Their view was that this
practice by ‘greedy boatmen’ from other ghats breached the age-old system of regulating passengers. How these conflicts would be solved remained an open question, but it highlighted one of the disruptive (and potentially explosive) effects that mobile phones had on community life and business practices.

By 2009, boatmen said that mobile phones—something unknown when Doron first met them ten years before—were essential for their business. All of them used the phone as an alarm clock to wake up at dawn, the most popular time for boat rides among tourists wishing to experience sunrise on the Ganges. Many boatmen noted that they rarely turned off their device, because clients could call at any hour to book their boat. Ramesh gave an example of how once when visiting his family outside Banaras he received a call from France late at night. The French tourist whom he had ferried several months before wanted Ramesh to arrange for a sunrise boat ride the next morning for a group of his friends visiting the city. Ramesh immediately called his brother, woke him and informed him which hotel and at what time to meet the group.

Assi Ghat boatmen in 2011 spent an average of Rs 500 a month on calls—five days’ wages for an agricultural labourer. Boatmen viewed this spending as a necessary investment in their growing business and expanding customer base. Many of the calls were made to other boatmen, often the workers or drivers who did not own boats or live on the ghats but who operated boats for others throughout the day. Raj Kumar, for example, owned three motor boats and two smaller row-boats; he employed several drivers to operate his fleet, because it was essential for him to remain on the ghat to bid for passengers. The ghat became an office with boatmen constantly on the phone liaising with their workers, monitoring their every move and ensuring they were back on time for the next load of passengers. Like the factory clock and the pocket watch of the nineteenth century, the mobile phone enabled discipline and control as well as independence and individuality.
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Priests (
pandas
) in Banaras had long experience of record-keeping as part of a generations-old system in which they and their forebears recorded the names, regions, horoscopes and gifts of clients from all over India. For the semi-literate boatmen, such record-keeping and time management were a major change from the more ‘task-oriented’ practices to which they were
accustomed.
⁵⁶
With the mobile phone, their lives and working habits were restructured. New disciplines and conventions were created, both among and between boatman and others. This is not to say that capitalism and a market economy were absent until the arrival of mobile phones, and nor is it to conjure up a romantic vision of the boatmen’s previous lives as being governed by the ‘unchanging rhythms of nature’.
⁵⁷
The moral economy of the old work structure embodied relations of hierarchy and domination, typified by those that prevailed among boatmen from different ghats.

The mobile phone undermined working systems based on a moral economy of social justice and time-honoured expectations. But it would be misleading to contrast the ‘rational’, self-maximising behaviour of mobile-phone users with the moral economy of the pre-mobile phone era. Reality was more complex. The boatmen worked in a distinctive occupation with its own codes and practices—a ‘living and breathing’ moral economy of boating that was constantly debated and contested within the community itself. The mobile phone became another variable in a chain of technological advances that posed challenges and brought opportunities. But the range of services and connections provided by the mobile phone, its ease of use and its very low cost made it a tool like no other for intruding into the lives and livelihoods of very large numbers of people.

On the farm …

At the beginning of the twenty-first century more than 50 per cent of Indians depended directly on agriculture for their livelihoods. True, the share of agriculture as a proportion of GDP fell to less than 15 per cent by 2010, but this statistic obscured a demographic truth: 70 per cent of India—more than 800 million people—still live in villages.

From when Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1984, governments and private agencies floated programs aiming to enable Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) not merely to benefit the poor but to attack poverty itself. Results of programs built around personal computers were discouraging. When Rajesh Veeraraghavan and his team worked in the western state of Maharashtra, ‘the second-richest in India’ in 2008, they found the remains of a computer-based project begun
ten years earlier to bring interactive information to villages:

Most, but not all, of the computers were in working condition … Cables had apparently been chewed by rats … The PCs were running Microsoft Windows 95 … Connectivity was provided by landline telephone dial-up, at a rate of no more than 10kbps [kilobytes per second], and use of the Internet … was restricted to standard File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to communicate between the [sugar] cooperative’s server and the village kiosks.
⁵⁸

Veeraraghavan and his colleagues found that the creaky computers performed one function: transferring data from villages to the cooperative headquarters and receiving in return news about when farmers were to be paid for crops.

These findings led them in a similar direction to EKO’s—towards devising ways to enable a mobile phone to deliver the services that most people most wanted. Simplicity was the key. They replaced the aged computers with cheap cell phones, one for each of the seven village kiosks where they were conducting the experiment. The idea was that the kiosk attendant would use the mobile phone instead of the computer and that the phone would be faster, more reliable and no longer tied to a room where rats might feast on cables.
⁵⁹
The system enabled an SMS message, using pre-defined fields, to query a farmer’s account with the sugar cooperative and generate an SMS reply providing the farmer’s latest entitlements and balances. Farmers liked the system, ‘possibly because they perceived mobile phones as a technology that they could understand’. It also gave them quick answers. Their officially measured crop tonnage, which in the past took two weeks to be processed and conveyed to them, was now available by SMS as soon as it was recorded at the cooperative’s headquarters. Within eight months, the seven mobile phones in the kiosk had been joined by sixty-one new mobiles purchased by those who wished to join the system and be independent of the kiosk and its attendant.
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Veeraraghavan and his colleagues had no illusions about what they had achieved in the seven villages. They had shown that straightforward systems dealing with everyday needs were readily taken up, even by people who were illiterate or semi-literate. Numbers and keypads could be quickly understood and mastered, and voice—the need only to speak—appeared an immensely attractive ingredient. Even in this prosperous region
of Maharashtra, ‘farmers are mostly illiterate’.
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Elsewhere in India, where people were poorer and illiteracy even more prevalent, voice messages for rural people also had major appeal.

India’s low levels of literacy emphasised one of the strong points of the simple mobile phone: the appeal of the human voice. Analysts of the modern telephone have for a hundred years discovered to their surprise that people like to talk to each other. Telephone proponents at the beginning of the twentieth century in North America thought they had to educate people in ways they could use the telephone and therefore why they would want one. However, users quickly discovered the social pleasures of the phone, and those living in rural areas led the way in acquiring them. Until the arrival of radio and the affordable automobile in the 1920s, more rural-dwellers in the USA had phones than their urban counterparts.
⁶²
Ninety years later in India, one of the first surveys of mobiles among north Indian peasants concluded that ‘most farmers … used their phones primarily for social purposes’.
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They also were among the world’s lowest users of text messaging,
⁶⁴
the result of lower literacy and complications from the fact that India works in 11 different scripts, all of them taught in the schools of their relevant states as the script in which to write one’s mother tongue. But texting in the scripts of languages such as Kannada or Oriya was not well supported with mobile-phone software (see
Conclusion
).

Yet the mobile phone was already altering rural and agricultural practices and held out promise of much greater change. Enthusiasm could be excessive: ‘Potentially enormous volumes of use …’, an enthusiast wrote, ‘will lead to economic expansion from the bottom up’.
⁶⁵
But technology does not eliminate political and social structures, though it may modify them. Among peasants and farmers, the wealthier and more skilled could use cell phones to consolidate their positions. An early study estimated that 40 per cent of crop losses could be prevented by early warnings about weather or blight delivered by text messages to cell phones.
⁶⁶
The larger your crop the more you stood to benefit (or lose), and if you had a larger holding, the chances were you would be among the first to acquire a mobile phone and have sufficient skills to use both voice and text messages. The vision of small cultivators empowered with information about prices that would allow them to move between markets and bargain
with middle men had only a few concrete manifestations. A survey found ‘some evidence that their bargaining power with traders improved when they were armed with market price information’, but the effects were patchy and inconsistent.
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