‘The Cheap Mobile Is A Top-Five Invention’

Author of India’s Newspaper Revolution and now Cell Phone Nation (co-authored with Assa Doron), Robin Jeffrey, visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore, is no stranger to India. In an interview to Anuradha Raman, he looks at our smallest instrument of communication as it changes the way we live.

Since 2013 when Cell Phone Nation was published, what has changed in India?

The big change is the one now rolling out so rapidly: the arrival of cheap smartphones. It’s happening faster than most people guessed—a phone that can do almost everything for Rs 6,000. That’s bad news for print-on-paper, because all those newly literate and not-so-literate people who might have read newspapers will very soon be able to get all the information they want—with colour and movement—whenever they want it. Bandwidth and content will become crucial questions for people who sell telecom services or make ‘content’.

How is the phone disruptive as well as a leveller in the context of communication in India?

The cheap mobile phone has given even the poorest people a chance to do two things: i) connect with government and mainstream media as they never could before; and ii) organise. Before the phone, a telegram and postcard were the only ways to call a meeting, set up an election strategy or keep in touch with like-minded activists.

Political parties like AAP and BJP have put the mobile to good use in elections? Has that widened the democratic space? If yes, in what way?

I think the BSP in UP in the 2007 elections were the first to get the most out of the cheap mobile as an organisatio­nal tool—which is what the cheap mobile has done most dramatically. Sending thousands of people smses probably doesn’t do much. But the ability to connect with party workers/sympathisers to organise, that’s where the cheap mobile makes a huge differe­nce. Mobiles don’t motivate people, but motivated peo­ple can be organised so much more effectively through them.

It’s embarrassing, one in two Indians has a cellphone but has no access to a toilet. How to explain the disconnect?

Easy. You don’t have to build a sewer or dig a pit to have a cellphone. You need just Rs 500 (to get started)—that’s five days’ wages for a NREGA worker. The old landlines had the problems that urban sewers have—they had to be physically connected by wires or pipes. Costly, difficult, vulnerable.

Is the mobile phone the greatest invention ever?

The cheap mobile must be on the top five list. It gave the poor the chance to com­m­un­i­­cate with the world. Every owner is a pot­­ential broadcaster/media-maker.

You first came to India in 1967, how has communication chan­ged here since, and has it been for the better?

Out of sight! Look at daily newspapers. In 1967, India put 6 million newspapers on the street each morning; 27 per cent were in English. In 2010, there were 160 million papers on the street each day and 13 per cent in English. In 1967, you could spend an entire day in the Chandigarh Sector 22 P&T office trying to complete a trunk call. If you had urgent news, you sent an express telegram—and hoped.

The mobile revolution, was it possible without state intervent­ion?

The government’s biggest contribution was to get out of the way. Where government has failed is in not giving the regulator sufficient powers. If competitive markets sometimes deliver resu­lts, they also need strong referees with loud whistles that have to be obeyed.

Do you see a future without phones?

Having experienced the joy of the mobile phone, human beings will be pretty angry—and it’ll be a big catastrophe—if they ever have to surrender it.