[Marxism] cellphone usage in India

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

can any comrades from India comment on this article?

Les

Dialing Up a Sea Change
India's Explosive Cellphone Use Empowers Millions of Laborers.
Fishing-Boat Skippers, Who Once Had Little Sway Over Prices, Are Now

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 15, 2006; A01

[snip]

The cellphone is bringing new economic clout, profit and productivity to
Rajan and millions of other poor laborers in India, the world's
fastest-growing cellphone market.

At the beginning of 2000, India had 1.6 million cellphone subscribers;
today there are 125 million -- three times the number of land lines in
the country. With 6 million new cellphone subscribers each month,
industry analysts predict that in four years nearly half of India's 1.1
billion people will be connected by cellphone.

That explosive growth has meant greater access to markets, information
about prices and new customers for tens of millions of Indian farmers
and fishermen.

A convenience taken for granted in wealthy nations, the cellphone is
putting cash in the pockets of people for whom a dollar is a good day's
wage. And it has made market-savvy entrepreneurs out of sheep herders,
rickshaw drivers and even the acrobatic men who shinny up palm trees to
harvest coconuts here in Kerala state.

"This has changed the entire dynamics of communications and how they
organize their lives," said C.K. Prahalad, an India-born business
professor at the University of Michigan, who has written extensively
about how commerce -- and cellphones -- are used to combat poverty.

"One element of poverty is the lack of information," Prahalad said. "The
cellphone gives poor people as much information as the middleman."

For less than a penny a minute -- the world's cheapest cellphone call
rates -- farmers in remote areas can check prices for their produce.
They call around to local markets to find the best deal. They also track
global trends using cellphone-based Internet services that show the
price of pumpkins or bananas in London or Chicago.

Indian farmers use camera-phones to snap pictures of crop pests, then
send the photos by cellphone to biologists who can identify the bug and
suggest ways to combat it. In cities, painters, carpenters and plumbers
who once begged for work door-to-door say they now have all the work
they can handle because customers can reach them instantly by cellphone.

T.V. Ramachandran, director general of the Cellular Operators
Association of India, a private industry group, said construction of new
cell towers is expanding most rapidly in rural areas, and India's
coverage area has tripled in the past year. He said cellphone growth is
driven by the young -- more than half the population is under 25 -- and,
increasingly, by people in neglected rural areas.

In a country where the World Bank calculates that nearly 80 percent of
the population lives on less than $2 a day, Ramachandran said cellphones
have become the "poor man's phone."

[snip]

"The two crucial changes that have happened in my lifetime," said Jayan
Kadavunkassery, 37, an Andavan crewman in a pink button-down shirt and a
lungi, "are the inboard motor and the mobile phone."

Rajan said that before he got his first cellphone a few years ago, he
used to arrive at port with a load of fish and hope for the best. The
wholesaler on the dock knew that Rajan's un-iced catch wouldn't last
long in the fiery Indian sun. So, Rajan said, he was forced to take
whatever price was offered -- without having any idea whether dealers in
the next port were offering twice as much.

Now he calls several ports while he's still at sea to find the best
prices, playing the dealers against one another to drive up the price.

New Balance of Power

Rajan said the dealers don't necessarily like the new balance of power,
but they are paying better prices to him and thousands of other
fishermen who work this lush stretch of coastline. "They are forced to
give us more money because there is competition," said Rajan, who
estimated that his income has at least tripled to an average of $150 a
month since 2000, when cellphones began booming in India. He said he is
providing for his family in ways that his fisherman father never could,
including a house with electricity and a television.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/14/AR2006101400342_pf.html

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