Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (46 page)

80.
   
TRAI Annual Report, 2006–07
, p. 49 and
20010–11
, p. 21.

81.
   Richard White,
Railroaded. The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), pp. xxxiv and 354–5.

82.
   There is debate about whether governments need interfere at all in the allocation of Radio Frequency; but since the 1920s, they have done so, and they are not likely to give up the power. See Robert Horvitz in
Financial Express
, 27 November 2011,
www.financialexpress.com/printer/news/716612
(accessed on 27 November 2010).

83.
   White,
Railroaded
, p. 511.

84.
   
BusinessLine
, 11 January 2008,
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/article1612977.ece
(accessed on 3 February 2011).
Times of India
, 25 June 2008. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, ‘Will Someone Take This Call?’,
Tehelka
, 15 May 2010,
http://tehelka.com/story_main44.asp?filename=Ne150510will_someone.asp
(accessed on 3 February 2011).

85.
   The figure of Rs 176,000 crores was a top estimate, which was popular in media reports. ‘A more realistic estimate’, concluded
EPW
, was Rs 58,000 to Rs 66,000 crores—about US $12 billion.
EPW
, 4 December 2010, p. 8.

86.
   Comptroller and Auditor-General,
Performance Audit Report
.

87.
   Ibid., p. vii.

88.
   Ibid., pp. 33 and 35.

89.
   Ibid., pp. 28–9.
www.thehindu.com/news/article889943.ece?service=mobile
(accessed on 20 March 2012).

90.
   Ibid., p. 56.

91.
   ‘Text of the Press Statement given by Shri Kapil Sibal on 2G Spectrum Issues’,
http://www.pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx
(accessed 8 February 2011).

92.
   
Business Standard
, 3 February 2012,
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/sc-cancels-122-telecom-licences-tells-govt-to-take-policyaction/463582/
(accessed on 2 March 2012).

93.
   
Outlook
magazine was one of those that broke the story in its issues of 29 November 2010, pp. 32–49, and 6 December 2010, pp. 34–40. Politicians learned the dangers of mobile phones as the technology spread. The landmark Australian case was in 1987 when two politicians in the same party were overheard obscenely demeaning a colleague—
http://australianpolitics.com/1987/03/23/kennett-peacock-car-phone-conversation.html
(accessed 14 March 2011).

94.
   
Frontline
, 11 March 2011, p. 10.

95.
   Mittal,
India’s New Entrepreneurial Classes
, p. 17.

3. MISSIONARIES OF THE MOBILE

  
1.
   Quoted in Claude
S. Fischer,
America Calling. A Social History of the Telephone to 1940
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 70.

  
2.
   
Live Mint
, 18 August 2010,
epaper.livemint.com/ArticleImage.aspx?article=18_08_2010_003_003&mode=1
(accessed 14 July 2011).

  
3.
   
Statistics of India
(Mumbai: Tata Services, for relevant years).

  
4.
   TRAI,
Annual Report 2005–06
, p. 100.

  
5.
   Fisher,
America Calling
, p. 85.

  
6.
   
TRAI Annual Report
,
2005–06
, pp. 47–8.

  
7.
   
Business Today
, 7 December 2003, archives.digitaltoday.in/businesstoday/20031207/books.html (accessed 15 July 2011).

  
8.
   
Business Today
, 23 May 2004, archives.digitaltoday.in/businesstoday/20040523/cover2.html (accessed 15 July 2011).

  
9.
   
Business Today
, 7 December 2003, ibid.

10.
   Interview, Kapil Arora, Senior Vice President and Country Head—Team Vodafone, Ogilvy and Mather, with R. Jeffrey, Mumbai, 28 March 2012.

11.
   
Business Today
, 23 May 2004, ibid.

12.
   
India Today
, 3 June 2011, indiatoday.intoday.in/site/articlePrint.jsp?aid=140263, for Rahul Singh on the book, Dhiraj Nayyar (ed.),
Dog Stories
(New Delhi: Natraj, 2011).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheeka_(dog)
(both accessed 15 July 2011).

13.
   C. A. Sanat Pyne, ‘Launch of Vodafone Essar’, n.d. [but 2007],
www.caclubindia.com/forum/hutch-to-vodafone-business-strategy-107895.asp
(accessed 14 July 2011).

14.
   Interview, Kapil Arora, 28 March 2012.
TRAI Annual Report, 2009–10
, pp. 27–8. Airtel was the leading provider with close to 130 million subscribers. Reliance, which offered both GSM and CDMA service, was roughly equal to Vodafone.

15.
   By March 2012, there had been three different Cheekas and some of the TV commercials had been filmed as far away as South Africa. Interview, Kapil Arora, 28 March 2012.

16.
   
India Today
, 3 June 2011, ibid. For rabies and biting dogs,
Tehelka
, 24 March 2012, p. 14.

17.
   
International Herald Tribune
, 8 August 2012, p. 1.

18.
   The calculation is based on the estimate of five persons to a household. In 2011, a similar calculation, based on a population of 1,200 million and 160 million TV households, suggest two-thirds of all Indians live in a household with a television set.

19.
   Prakash Tandon,
Return to Punjab
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), Gurcharan
Das,
India Unbound
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) and William Mazzarella,
Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) discuss complexities of advertising in India.

20.
   Mazzarella,
Shoveling Smoke
, p. 175 and Chapters 5 and 6.

21.
   Dhananjay Khanderao Keskar, ‘Reliance Infocomm’, in Arindam Mukherjee (ed.),
The Icfai Press on Mobile Service Providers: Perspectives and Practices
(Hyderabad: Icfai University Press, 2009), p. 200.

22.
   For the launch techniques of
Eenadu
and
Dainik Bhaskar
, see Jeffrey,
India’s Newspaper Revolution
, pp. 68–9, 240.

23.
   
Outlook
, 5 May 2003,
http://m.outlookindia.com/story.aspx?sid=4&aid=220032
(accessed 11 July 2012).

24.
   ‘Vodafone’s serious commitment to India’, 1 June 2010, Vodafone internal document. Jeffrey is grateful to Neil Gough of Vodafone for making this available at an interview, New Delhi, 2 June 2010.

25.
   Interview, Anuradha Aggarwal, Senior Vice President, Consumer Insights and Communication, Vodafone India Limited, with R. Jeffrey, Mumbai, 28 March 2012.

26.
   Cellular Operators Association of India [hereafter COAI],
Annual Report, 2002–03
, pp. 8, 43.

27.
   A. Neela Radhika, and A. Mukund, ‘Airtel Magic—Selling a Pre-paid Cell-phone Service’, ICFAI University Press, 2003, http//
www.scribd.com/doc/54318936/Airtel-Magic-Selling-a-Pre-Paid-Cellphone-Service
(accessed on 21 September 2012).

28.
   Interview, Bobby Sebastian, Circle Head, India Telecom Infra Ltd, with R. Jeffrey, Kochi, 24 November 2010.

29.
   ‘Vodafone’s serious commitment to India’, 1 June 2010, Vodafone internal document.

30.
   The SIM cards themselves were the product of complex processes. Manufactured largely in China, they required the stamping of minute metal-alloy circuitry onto the tiny plastic base that eventually went into a mobile phone. Indian providers had to import the cards in large quantities. As late as 2010, Indian governments fretted over the fact that India was not making its own SIM cards and that this posed ‘a grave security threat’. See
Economic Times
, 12 November 2010,
http://m.economictimes.com/PDAET/articleshow/6910564.cms
(accessed 1 August 2011).

31.
   McDonald,
Mahabharat in Polyester
, pp. 304–05. Reliance and Tata used CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology, not the European standard GSM in which ‘genuine’ Indian mobile phone licensees had invested.

32.
   TRAI,
Annual Report, 2005–06
, pp. 36–7.

33.
   Cellular Operators Association of India [hereafter COAI],
Annual Report, 2002–03
, pp. 5, 9.

34.
   Ibid., p. 51.

35.
   Desai,
India’s Telecommunications Industry
, p. 134.

36.
   
Businessline
, 15 April 2010,
www.thehindubusinessline/com/2010/04/15/
stories/20100415507202000.htm
(accessed 16 December 2010).

37.
   Shailesh Shah, ‘Upgrade or
Perish: D. Satish Babu’,
indiaretailing.com
, 19 July 2011,
www.indiaretailing.com/person-of-the-week.asp
(accessed 19 July 2011).

38.
   Interview, Ramesh Barath, Vice-President, New Business Development and Marketing, UniverCell, with R. Jeffrey, Chennai, 15 November 2010.

39.
   P. Madhusudhan Reddy, ‘Univercell plans to come out with IPO soon’,
andhrabusiness.com
, 28 June 2010,
http://andhrabusiness.com/NewsDesc.aspx?NewsId=Univercell-plans-to-come-out-with-IPO-soon.html
(accessed 19 July 2011).
www.univercell.in/mobiles/populatestaticabout.action
(accessed 19 July 2011).

40.
   Interview, Ramesh Barath, Vice-President, New Business Development and Marketing, UniverCell, with R. Jeffrey, Chennai, 15 November 2010.

41.
   Thomas H. Eriksen,
Globalization: The Key Concepts
(New York: Berg, 2007), p. 53.

42.
   Gerald Perschbacher,
Wheels in Motion: the American Automobile Industry’s First Century
(Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1996), p. 44. Sally H. Clarke,
Trust and Power
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 82.

43.
   Visits, R. Jeffrey, 16 and 17 March 2009, Allahabad, with Professor Badri Narayan and Professor M. Aslam. See also Robin Jeffrey and Assa Doron, ‘Celling India: Exploring a Society’s Embrace of the Mobile Phone’,
South Asian History and Culture
, vol. 2, no. 3 (2011), pp. 397–416.

44.
   Interview, Ramesh Barath and Sunil Ramachandran, with R. Jeffrey, Chennai, 15 November 2010.

45.
   Interview, Anuradha Aggarwal, with R. Jeffrey, Mumbai, 28 March 2012.

46.
   Doron visited Ravi Varma’s shop on various occasions from 2009–2012 and is grateful for his hospitality and co-operation.

47.
   Interview, Ravi Varma, with A. Doron, Banaras, 4 February 2011.

48.
   Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery,
Degrees without Freedom? Education, Masculinities, and Unemployment in North India
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

49.
   Nimi Rangaswamy and S. Nair, ‘The Mobile Phone Store Ecology in a Mumbai Slum Community: Hybrid Networks for Enterprise’,
Information Technologies & International
Development, vol. 6, no. 3 (2010), p. 52.

50.
   Interview, Anuradha Aggarwal, with R. Jeffrey, Mumbai, 28 March 2012.

51.
   Ibid.