Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (47 page)

4. MECHANICS OF THE MOBILE

  
1.
   
Hindu
, 2 February 2012,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2853159.ece?homepage=true
accessed 2 February 2012). The company was Uninor, a joint venture of Telenor of Norway and Unitech.

  
2.
   Sunil Mani, ‘The Mobile Communications Services Industry in India: Has It Led to
India Becoming a Manufacturing Hub for Telecommunication Equipment?’,
Pacific Affairs
, vol. 85, no. 3 (September 2012) pp. 511–30, quo ting
Annual Survey of Industries
statistics. Mittal,
India’s New Entrepreneurial Classes
, p. 17, estimated 3.5 million employed in all aspects of the telecom in 2005.

  
3.
   Perschbacher,
Wheels in Motion
, pp. 50–1.

  
4.
   Bureau of Labour Statistics, ‘Automotive Industry: Employment, Earnings, and Hours’, February 2012,
http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm
(accessed 13 April 2012).

  
5.
   Interview, Sabyasachi Patra, head, government relations, Nokia, Sriperumbudur, with R. Jeffrey, Sriperumbudur, 15 November 2010. Patra became executive director of the peak body of India’s information-technology hardware industry in December 2011.
http://news.ciol.com/News/Executive-Track/News-Reports/Sabyasachi-Patra-New-executive-director-of-MAIT/157519/0/
(accessed 11 July 2012).

  
6.
   Anibel Ferus-Comelo and Paivi Poyhonen,
Phony Equality: Labour Standards of Mobile Phone Manufacturers in India
(Helsinki: Finnwatch, Cividep and SOMO, 2011), pp. 4, 9,
http://cividep.org/wp-content/uploads/Phony_Equality.pdf
(accessed 6 February 2012).

  
7.
   Ibid., p. 19.

  
8.
   Ibid., pp. 20–1.

  
9.
   Ibid., p. 18.

10.
   Ibid., p. 37.

11.
   Ibid., p. 23.

12.
   Ibid., p. 23.

13.
   Ibid., p. 28.

14.
   Ibid., p. 34.

15.
   Ibid., pp. 40, 42.
Frontline
, 19 November 2010, pp. 37–40.

16.
  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncHdu6TLt-U
(accessed 7 February 2012).

17.
   Dilip Subramanian,
Telecommunications Industry in India: State, Business and Labour in a Global Economy
(New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2010), p. 249.

18.
   Ibid., p. 373.

19.
   Interview, Sudhir Kumar Mehra, General Manager, ITI Limited, with A. Doron, Raebareli, 10 February 2011.

20.
   NGOs increasingly report deplorable working conditions in mobile phone factories in Asia, most of which employ young, rural women. For employment conditions in Nokia factories in China, see
http://www.sask.fi/english/magazine/makeitfair/
(accessed 15 April 2012)

21.
  
http://industowers.com/
(accessed 8 February 2012).

22.
  
http://industowers.com/vision_mission.php
(accessed 8 February 2012).

23.
   Interview, Bobby Sebastian with R. Jeffrey, Kochi, 24 November 2010.

24.
   
Hindu
, 6 March 2012,
http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/
chennai/article2964946.ece
(accessed 22 June 2012). We touch on polluting effects of diesel emissions in the Conclusion.

25.
   
Hindustan
(Lucknow), 4 June 2010, p. 6.

26.
   The
term
mistrii
means ‘skilled artisan’ or ‘master mason’, and seems to have originated from either the Portuguese word ‘mestre’ or the Dutch word ‘mester’ (both meaning master). In north India the title
mistrii
is usually associated with builders, constructions workers, carpenters and stonemasons. See M.S.R. Dalgado
, Portuguese Vocables in Asiatic Languages
(Delhi: Asian Education Services, 1988), p. 228.

27.
   Nimmi Rangaswamy and Sumitra Nair, ‘The Mobile Phone Store Ecology in a Mumbai Slum Community: Hybrid Networks for Enterprise’,
Information Technologies and International Development
, vol. 6, no. 3 (2010), pp. 51–65.

28.
   See Ravi Sundaram’s insightful analysis of Delhi’s media-scapes and grey markets,
Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbansim
(New Delhi: Routledge, 2010).

29.
   Daal Mandi refers to any large market in UP which deals with a variety of goods, traditionally food items, hence the name Dal (lentil) Mandi (market). Many towns in UP have a Daal Mandi where both second-hand items and semi-illicit commodities are sold.

30.
   Interview, Sabyasachi Patra, head, government relations, Nokia, Sriperumbudur, with R. Jeffrey, Sriperumbudur, 15 November 2010.

31.
   Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Violence of Commodity Aesthetics: Hawkers, Demolition Raids, and a New Regime of Consumption’,
Social Text
, vol. 19, no. 3 (2001), pp. 91–113.

32.
   E. B. White, ‘Farewell, My Lovely’,
New Yorker
, 16 May 1936,
http://www.wesjones.com/white1.htm
(accessed 9 February 2012).

33.
   Ibid.

34.
   Nimmi Rangaswamy and Sumitra Nair, ‘The Mobile Phone Store’, p. 62.

35.
   Leela Fernandes examines training and educational institutes catering for the aspiring middle classes in
India’s New Middle Class
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 98–100.

36.
   The International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number is unique to each phone and functions like an electronic fingerprint, transmitted every time a handset is used and revealing the identity of the handset. Many China Mobiles and smuggled phones had fake IMEI numbers until the Indian government banned these phones from networks for security reasons late in 2009.

37.
   David Edgerton,
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 69.

38.
   For example, Eriksen,
Globalization
.

39.
   Ira Raja, ‘Rethinking Relationality in the Context of Adult Mother-Daughter Caregiving in Indian Fiction’,
Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts
, vol. 3 (2009), pp. 25–37.

40.
   The film director, Shekhar Kapur, had similar anxieties when his Blackberry failed, but once he surrendered his mobile to the street-side repair shop in Mumbai, he was enlightened, as he wrote on his blog,
http://shekharkapur.com/blog/2010/07/a-blackberry-addict-discovers-grass roots-enterprise-in-india/
(accessed 26 July 2012).

41.
   For discussion of the seeming dichotomy of the formal/informal divide, see Assa Doron, ‘Consumption, technology and adaptation: care and repair economies of mobile phones in north India’,
Pacific Affairs
, vol. 85, no. 3 (September 2012), pp. 563–86.

42.
   Michael Herzfeld,
The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2003).

5. FOR BUSINESS

  
1.
   For example,
A. Kumar, A. Tewari, G. Shroff, D. Chittamuru, M. Kam, and J. Canny, ‘An Exploratory Study of Unsupervised Mobile Learning in Rural India’, paper presented at CHI 2010 conference, Atlanta, 10–15 April 2010,
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~anujk1/CHI2010.pdf
(accessed 28 February 2012). D. Raha and S. Cohn-Sfetcu, ‘Turning the Cellphone into an Antipoverty Vaccine’,
Journal of Communications
, vol. 4, no. 3 (2009), pp. 203–210.

  
2.
   Peter D. O’Neill, ‘The “Poor Man’s Mobile Telephone”: Access versus Possession to Control the Information Gap in India’,
Contemporary South Asia
, vol. 12, no. 1 (2003), p. 98.

  
3.
   Rajat Kathuria, Mahesh Uppal and Mamta [sic], ‘An Econometric Analysis of the Impact of the Mobile’, in
India: the Impact of Mobile Phones
(New Delhi: Vodafone, 2009), pp. 8, 14.

  
4.
   Surabhi Mittal, Sanjay Gandhi and Gaurav Tripathi, ‘The Impact of Mobile Phones on Agricultural Productivity”, in Kathuria
et al., India: the Impact of Mobile Phones
, p. 32.

  
5.
   Interviews with A. Doron, Panaji, Goa, February 2010.

  
6.
   Mahesh Uppal and Rajat Kathuria, ‘The Impact of Mobiles in the SME Sector’, in Kathuria
et al., India: the Impact of Mobile Phones
, pp. 54–60.

  
7.
   There are, of course, forgeries and illicit SIMs circulating. For example,
http://janamejayaneconomics.wordpress.com/
2012/06/04/cell-phonemenace-sim-terror/
(accessed 26 June 2012). For crime, see Chapter 8.

  
8.
   T. T. Sreekumar, ‘Mobile Phones and the Cultural Ecology of Fishing’,
Information Society
, vol. 27, no. 3 (2011), p. 174.

  
9.
   
New York Times
, 4 August 2001,
www.nytimes.com/2001/08/04/technology/
04PHON.html?
(accessed 1 September 2011).

10.
   
Washington Post
, 15 October 2006,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wpdyn/content/article/2006/10/14/AR2006101400342.html
(accessed 1 September 2011). The fishermen were still getting international recognition six years later. See Shashi Tharoor, ‘The cell phone revolution: Mobile phones have empowered India’s underclass’,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, 13 May 2012,
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/the-cell-phone-revolution-mobile-phones-have-empowered-indias-under-class-635700/
(accessed 24 June 2012).

11.
   Robert Jensen, ‘The Digital
Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector’,
Quarterly Journal of Economics
, vol. 122, no. 3 (2007), p. 883.

12.
   Ibid., p. 879.

13.
   Ibid., p. 883.

14.
   Reuben Abraham, ‘Mobile Phones and Economic Development: Evidence from the Fishing Industry in India’,
Information Technology and International Development
, vol. 4, no. 1 (2007), p. 9.

15.
   C. K. Prahalad,
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2005), pp. 15–16.

16.
   This was a more modest estimate than the 1.2 per cent increase to State Domestic Product put forward in
India: the Impact of Mobile Phones
, which had been sponsored by Vodafone. (See Note 3 of this chapter).

17.
   
Economist
, 10 May 2007,
www.economist.com/node/9149142
(accessed 1 September 2011).

18.
   
Washington Post
, 15 October 2006,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/
content/article/2006/10/14/AR2006101400342.html
(accessed 1 September 2011).

19.
   Sanjay Gandhi, Surabhi Mittal and Gaurav Tripathi, ‘The Impact of Mobiles on Agricultural Productivity’, in
India: the Impact of Mobile Phones
, Policy Papers Series No. 9 (New Delhi: Vodafone Group, 2009), p. 29. Fishermen in Goa told Doron similar stories about lives saved by mobile phones during freak storms in February 2010.

20.
   Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai,
Chemmeen
(Bombay: Jaico, 1964), p. 79.

21.
   
Washington Post
, 15 October 2006,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/
content/article/2006/10/14/AR2006101400342.html
(accessed 1 September 2011).

22.
   Sreekumar, ‘Mobile Phones and the Cultural Ecology of Fishing’, p. 174.