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Phones in the United States and India (part 2)

Compared to mobile phones, an even more recent arrival in India is the smartphone. In 2009, smartphones were unheard-of in the Garo Hills. I don’t remember ever seeing them anywhere I went in north and northeast India either. By 2013, smartphones were more in evidence in Jaipur when I spent the summer there, but more in TV ads than real life. Now in 2015, smartphones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. When I ride the Delhi Metro, half of the passengers are fiddling with smartphones, reading something in English, Hindi, or Punjabi, or playing a game. Apple iPhones are not as common in India as the USA, since most people don’t care to pay the premium price. The Samsung Galaxy is much more common as a prestige phone. There are also several indigenous brands not seen in the USA, such as Micromax.

What is remarkable to me about smartphones in India is that they are being adopted by a wide range of social classes. There is nothing remarkable about the privileged urban youth of India using smartphones in 2015, although I feel that they try too hard to prove that they have arrived in the twenty-first century by taking too many selfies and signing up for all of the social media services, and then posting all of those selfies, and anything else they think or do, on all of the services. They aren’t just using the usual suspects like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, but also services I’d never heard of before coming to India this time.

What I do find remarkable is that some manual laborers and service workers, like the maid who works in the house where I stay in Delhi, have started using smartphones. Non-smartphones have not been marginalized in the market as definitively as they have been in the West, but it is clear to me that for certain classes of Indians, smartphones are now the only socially acceptable option. This is not the case for lower classes, but it is worth noting that lower-income groups now have access to the same technology that the privileged classes are using for status symbols.

Mobile phones gave many members of lower-income and rural populations access to their own phones for the first time. In the same way, smartphones are making the Internet more widely accessible. In the Garo Hills in 2009, when I wanted to check my e-mail, I had to hitch a ride to the nearby town and pay Rs. 40 an hour to use a slow, unreliable cell-network connection at a computer services shop. Sometimes I would arrive and the power would be out, or the manager would be away, or the connection would inexplicably not be working. This was an all-afternoon outing, and I could only make it once every week or two. I went to the effort to access the Internet because I had already become reliant upon it from my life in the West. For those who had never used the Internet before, it wasn’t likely that they were going to go out of their way to start using it there. Now, the growing number of smartphone users can access the Internet whenever they want, without having to go anywhere.

It is much too early to make any conclusions about what all of this means for Indian society. Are smartphones an egalitarian technology, like non-smartphones? TV ads that show sequestered women in rural Haryana using their smartphones to access educational resources would have you believe so. Of course, TV ads playing on the same channels also claim that “Love and Nourish” soap will give you perfect skin like Kareena Kapoor, and “Juzt Jelly” candies will give you the strength of the children’s cartoon hero Chhota Bheem. In the case of smartphones, though, this technology may indeed give economically disadvantaged people access to knowledge resources that were too expensive to access beforehand. Or smartphones might prove to be just a passive form of entertainment, opening the way for huge sections of the Indian population to become addicted to the next “Candy Crush.” I suspect that smartphones in India are already on their way to proving themselves as both useful tools and useless toys.

Phones in the United States and India (part 1)

When I first went to India in 2009, I was surprised to see that seemingly everybody had a mobile phone. I still thought of mobile phones as a luxury, because that is how the technology began its life in the United States. But by 2009, even in the rural Garo Hills, cowherds and fishermen had mobiles, even though these people led lives that were figuratively and literally a world apart from the affluent American college students I had been used to seeing with cell phones. Surely if Garo villagers could afford mobiles, then this technology was no longer a luxury.

The course of technological change has been quite different in India and the United States. The adoption of telephones illustrates the difference. In the USA, the first telephones came into use in the late nineteenth century, and they worked by sending voice encoded as electric signals through lines specially strung for that purpose. Telephones served a niche urban market at first, but as they became cheaper and the American population became more affluent, they expanded to suburban and rural markets as well. Telephone use became overwhelmingly common in the United States after World War II.

Mobile phones, also known as cell phones, were a much later addition to the American technological landscape, but they took root faster than the traditional wired phones or landlines. The earliest handheld mobiles reached the market in the 1980s, but they were bulky and impractical, as well as extremely expensive. They came in two parts: a handset and an additional transmitter and battery pack that the user carried in the other hand, like a combat telephone. My father reports that despite their impracticality, early mobile phones were a status symbol, and he would see executives proudly carrying them on the streets of San Francisco.

Both the size and the cost of mobile phones decreased dramatically during the 1990s. By the middle of the decade, they were cheap enough to be within reach of the American middle class mass, although they did not really start to catch on until the end of the decade. Around the middle of the next decade, my demographic at the time, college students, had so thoroughly adopted mobile phones that now anybody who didn’t have one had to explain why not.

The course of technological adoption in India was quite different, because wired landlines never became as popular here as they did in the United States. Telephone networks existed in India during colonial times, but they were limited to large cities and were too expensive for the majority of the population. After Independence in 1947, cities were linked through Standard Trunk Dialing (STD) networks, but the vast majority of the Indian population still lived in villages and had no access to this service. Even for urbanites, installing a telephone line was a lengthy process with manifold bureaucratic hurdles. In Anurag Mathur’s novel The Inscrutable Americans, the main character Gopal tells his American friend Randy that the installation of a telephone line in a home is a cause for celebration, second in importance only to the birth of a son. This is of course artistic license, but it illustrates how difficult it was to obtain a telephone connection in pre-liberalization India.

This began to change with the advent of mobile phone networks in the 1990s. The widespread adoption of mobile phones in India lagged the United States by about five years. In 2000, mobile phones were still a luxury in India. Each call cost Rs. 10, and handsets were out of the reach of all but the wealthy. This changed when the private industrial conglomerate Reliance Industries forced competing carriers to lower their rates by slashing handset costs and call prices by 90 percent. (A friend of mine in Delhi tells me that he got his first mobile phone in 2003 as a free promotional with 5 kg of oil.) By 2009, mobile networks had spread all across the country, and now served rural areas where it would have been too expensive to run landlines. For most of the Indian population (India’s population is still 70 percent rural), mobile phones leapfrogged landlines. Communities that had no access to any form of two-way direct communication now had telephones that they could carry with them wherever they went.

Mobile phones facilitated cultural change in both the United States and India, but the change was much more dramatic in India. Ten years ago, when cell phones were still novel enough in my demographic to be worth discussing, I heard this line on a regular basis: “I just don’t know how we survived before cell phones!” But this was a silly thing to say. Of course the way we survived was by planning ahead and using landlines. For the mass of the Indian population, the adoption of mobile phones really was revolutionary, because it allowed instantaneous voice communication over a distance, as well as the mobility that my demographic found so indispensable. But for us in the West, mobile phones were evolutionary, not revolutionary, because they permitted an extension of capabilities that we already had. For those Indians who had never had landlines, mobile phones really were revolutionary.

By 2009, mobile phones had gotten cheap enough to be accessible even to most of the poorer classes of Indians. Mobile phones facilitated business transactions and community organization, more quickly and cheaply than any means available prior to the phones’ arrival. Since they are now so widely accessible, mobiles have become an egalitarian technology, as they give a large portion of the population access to useful services previously accessible only to the elite.

Digging out

BAJENGDOBA, MEGHALAYA, INDIA – On September 22 of last year, the Garo Hills of northeast India were ravaged by the worst floods in memory. Monsoon storms triggered flash floods in many of the region’s river valleys. The flooding and related landslides took the lives of around seventy residents of the hills, in addition to causing extensive property damage.

The Garo Hills have a special significance for me, because I spent a year living and teaching here between college and graduate school, from 2009 to 2010. When reports of the floods began to circulate in the days and weeks following September 22, I was horrified to think about such a catastrophe occurring to a place and to people I know and love. Now, in January 2015, I am fortunate to have the chance to visit the Garo Hills again and see the flood damage and subsequent recovery for myself.

The school where I taught, Riverside Adventist Academy, is located in the district worst-affected by the floods, North Garo Hills. On the morning of September 22, the Jinari River entered the school campus by opening a new channel leading right into the cafeteria and big boys’ and girls’ hostels (dormitories). The river toppled sections of the compound walls and brought branches and logs sweeping into campus.

Before the walls fell, the hostel students evacuated to the top floor of the classroom building as the rushing flood water rose above their knees. Three small boys lost their footing and were swept away by the current, but remarkably they were caught in the branches of a banyan tree on the edge of campus. Not a single student from Riverside school was lost in the flood, but one teacher drowned after helping many students to safety. His name was Rituraj Phukan, and he was 31 years old.

It has been almost four months since the floods, and I am happy to see that the school is recovering well. The broken sections of the compound wall have been replaced by temporary fencing. Teachers and non-teaching staff have spent weeks painstakingly cleaning the campus – shoveling mud out of the buildings, righting and re-rooting trees toppled by the water, and clearing away logs that washed onto campus. I am impressed by how beautiful the campus looks now, with graceful gulmohur trees casting their shade onto the walkways. Apart from the broken compound walls and an ugly landslide gash on a nearby hillside, there are few obvious signs that this place was inundated by a deluge just four months ago.

Riverside school will reopen on-schedule for the 2015 academic year in early February. The school and the surrounding community have begun to recover from the floods, but despite appearances, the recovery is far from complete. Damage to buildings and other infrastructure in the Garo Hills (such as the school compound’s walls) will take time to repair. Harder to quantify – and likely harder to repair – will be the human toll of the floods. From my conversations with teachers and students who were at Riverside on September 22, it is clear to me that the floods were a deeply traumatic experience. Many witnesses expressed shock that such a disaster could happen. One student told me that she still feels like it was all a dream. I have noticed more gray hair in the Garo Hills than I remember seeing five years ago. I wonder if the stress of having their homeland inundated is causing the population of the Garo Hills to go prematurely gray.

Even these emotional wounds will heal some day. The families that lost sons and daughters, mothers and fathers to the flooding and landslides will also eventually learn to live without the deceased. This will take years, but I am certain it will happen. I am also certain, though, that the great Meghalaya floods of 2014 will never be forgotten, as long as victims and witnesses of the floods are alive to tell their stories.

(This post continues coverage of the Meghalaya floods, which I started in this post.)

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