Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (9 page)

The people who drafted the constitution of 1950 and ran the national government were largely upper-caste lawyers who knew English. By 2012, India had had only two Prime Ministers from lower castes, the brief tenures of Charan Singh in 1979 and H. D. Deve Gowda in 1996. The sense of ‘knowing what was good for the masses’ stemmed both from the civil-service mentality inherited from the British and from the notion that higher castes were the arbiters of what constituted suitable conduct for society. The development of radio provided an example. The British treated radio with suspicion and controlled it tightly. After independence, high-caste government ministers made All India Radio (AIR) a byword for ponderous high culture, government pronouncements and tedium.
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Maintained as a department of government, radio and television were managed in ways that discouraged innovation and ensured that ordinary people only rarely found programming that connected with their lives.

The First Five-Year Plan in 1951 recognised
the need for better telephone service:

The most insistent demand for development is in the fields of telephones. India is very backward in this regard; it is even more backward than, for instance, China. The number of telephone lines in the whole of India is less than that in one city of Australia, vis., Sidney [sic].
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But grand economic goals of self-sufficiency and elimination of imports meant that telephones waited for government to attend to them. ‘For the rapid development of the telephone service’, noted the Second Five-Year Plan in 1956, ‘it is necessary that telephone equipment should be manufactured within the country’. A factory was built that could produce 50,000 phones a year by the mid-1950s. It started ‘by assembling telephone instruments from imported parts’, but later was able ‘to produce 520 out of the 539 parts of a telephone instrument’. The discussion continued in a manner characteristic of the time. The product and what it might do were not so important as the fact that it was ‘made in India’. ‘Of the remaining 19 items as many as 17 are manufactured by other Indian firms, only 2 being imported from abroad’.
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The Five-Year Plans, concluded one analyst, ‘gave telephones low priority, classifying them as a luxury’.
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Such an attitude was not unique to India. Elites elsewhere tut-tutted at the acquisition of mobile phones by poor people. ‘Wealthier Jamaicans’, Horst and Miller wrote, ‘often denigrate impoverished individuals for continuing to buy and use cell phones’.
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The big black bakelite blocks that
were telephones in pre-mobile India could be instruments of exquisite torture. They were carefully guarded, often in locked boxes. Lines were often out of order, and if they were working, they crackled like pine needles in the open fire of a hill-station guesthouse. To locate the appropriate person in an office in which one phone served dozens of people called for the patience of Job and the luck of the Irish. Placing a trunk call could involve half a day of waiting for the operator to ring back, frequently with the message that the recipient was unavailable or that the line was out of order. For extra payment one could place a ‘lightning call’. ‘Using a telephone’, reflected one Indian writer, ‘used to be a hellish undertaking’.
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All this is not surprising given the attitude to telecommunications of some of the elite—who did have access to phones. A document intended to initiate discussion about the Sixth Five-Year Plan in 1977 argued:

The primary need of the people is food, water and shelter. Telephone development can wait. In place of doing any good, development in the telecommunications infrastructure has tended to intensify the migration of population from rural to urban areas. There is need to curb growth of telecommunication infrastructure, particularly in the urban area.
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In 1977–79 and 1989–91, coalition governments imbued with belief in small-scale self-sufficiency reduced expenditure on telecommunications in the national economic plan.
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When Mrs Gandhi was murdered in 1984, there were fewer than four telephones for every 1,000 people: 2.6 million phones for a population close to 730 million. (See
Table 1.1
).
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Untying communication

A modest change began when her son, Rajiv Gandhi, became Prime Minister. Journalists gave him a reputation for being a lover of gadgets, but he appears simply to have been up to date. He ‘introduced a new style of work at the highest level’. Power-point presentations replaced typed memoranda. This was ‘absolutely novel in 1985–86. Everyone was free to present his point of view but only through transparencies using an overhead projector or a PC and LCD projector’.
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As a former airline pilot, Rajiv Gandhi had regularly faced the consequences of a paralytic telephone system.
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Airports and airlines depended on telephones for activities ranging from bookings and passenger alerts to organising crew and finding hotels. Within two months of becoming Prime Minister, his government created a new Department of Telecommunications, hived off from its old association with the Department of Communications and the post office.
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By 1986, two public corporations had been created with the intention that they would work like businesses rather than government departments. One was to handle overseas communications (VSNL—Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd), and the other was dedicated to the telecom needs of the two great cities, New Delhi and Mumbai (MTNL—Mahanagar Telecom Nigam Ltd).

The noticeable expansion of the
ability to share information—the democratisation of information-sharing—came with the creation of tens of thousands of Public Call Offices, affectionately known as ‘PCOs’. (See
Illus. 3
). Public telephones of any kind had been rare. Post-office phones intended for public use were often out of order, and in the queues waiting to place calls people had time to play cards, write letters and form life-long friendships. Sam Pitroda, a US-based Indian engineer and entrepreneur, was sometimes credited with having made the PCO concept possible, both technically and bureaucratically.
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‘I was captivated by the man’, wrote one of the admirers who worked with him, ‘and life was never the same again for me’.
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The rags-to-riches version of Pitroda’s life tells of a man who made a fortune in the US and then determined to do something for India. He convinced Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of his vision and became a friend of Rajiv Gandhi. Indira Gandhi enabled Pitroda to set up the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), and during Rajiv’s time in office from 1984–89 Pitroda and C-DOT flourished. The achievement lay in designing, and getting into production, small cheap digital switching units—the boxes that transfer telephone calls from the caller to the recipient. ‘These rural exchanges’, Pitroda wrote proudly, ‘were small masterpieces of “appropriate” design’, able to withstand dust, heat and rough handling.
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Their manufacture was licensed to private companies, one of which later transformed itself into Airtel, India’s biggest provider of mobilephone services in the early twenty-first century.

C-DOT could claim only tangential responsibility for mobile-phone expansion, and C-DOT’s detractors pilloried Pitroda after Rajiv Gandhi’s defeat.
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Mobile phones took another fifteen years to trickle, and then flood, across India. C-DOT could, however, claim an educational achievement. Its ‘switching units’ drove the creation of Public Call Offices (PCOs).
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Pitroda wrote that ‘in 1964 … I was only 21 years old and I had never used a telephone’.
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PCOs not only lessened the horrors of making a phone call; they put phones within reach of people who had never used one before. In 1980, there were only 12,000 public phone booths in the whole of India. Once it became possible through electronic rather than mechanical switching of calls to handle larger volumes of traffic, PCOs were encouraged as small businesses. Painted bright yellow, the booths sprang up around the country from 1986 either as part of existing shops or as new enterprises; the right to run a PCO often was granted to people like ex-servicemen. A simple meter recorded the length of a call and calculated the charge. PCOs did not penetrate the countryside; there was not enough traffic in villages to make the business worthwhile; but now it was possible to place quick reliable calls to phones throughout India. By 1990, a student living away from home, as Pitroda was in 1964, was no longer likely to be a stranger to the telephone.

In raw numbers, however, the telephone
was still a rare medium in India at the time of the First Gulf War and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991. The population of 840 million people had 5.1 million telephones—the imaginary queue to use a phone was down to 165 people for every telephone (
Table 1.1
). Though PCOs meant that it was possible to place calls reliably and with perhaps only a few minutes of queuing, the telephone was still a special instrument, its ownership and daily private use confined to urban upper-middle classes, businesses and officials. In 1994, the waiting list to get a telephone installed was four years, and the number of people on it had grown to two million.
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Questions of chickens and eggs arise when one analyses the growth of Indian telephony in the 1990s. It is an old and much-loved debate among the social scientists. Does technology mould behaviour or do people and their circumstances determine why and how technologies are accepted or rejected? Invention is essential. But the existence of a device does not mean large numbers of people will adopt it. A cluster of things happen to make technologies enter people’s lives in widespread life-changing ways. This happened, as things often do in India, slowly.

The small changes of the 1980s represented
the recognition by Rajiv Gandhi and his government that telephones needed to work better. Internationally, the United Nations declared 1979 a year of telecommunications, and advocates of development increasingly emphasised improved communications as crucial for bringing benefits to the poor. All over the world, government-controlled monopoly telecommunications organisations were being broken up.
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As India’s overseas population grew, prospered and moved back and forth to India from the US, Canada and the UK, they wailed at the poor quality of the telephone system.

Two major obstacles needed to be overcome: the need for wires and the inertia of the state-controlled telephone monopoly. With 75 per cent of the population in 600,000 villages, the difficulties of connecting large numbers of people—or even large numbers of villages—to a telephone line were immense. A 1970 estimate calculated that 8,500 kilometres of cable were necessary for every 100,000 telephones installed. India produced less than half that amount of cable annually, enough to install perhaps 50,000 phones. Having designated the manufacture of telephone cable as something to be done by public-sector industries, the government decreed that cable would not be imported.
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Various innovations in the technology and governance of telecommunications were in progress elsewhere in the world when India’s heavily regulated economy was hit by the freight train of the First Gulf War. The effects of the war knocked the old economic system off the rails. Inflated oil prices and devastated foreign-exchange remittances from Indians working in West Asia threatened to leave India too poor to pay for its energy imports. Elections came in the midst of this economic crisis, and during the elections Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. A Congress-led government came to power in June 1991 and quickly agreed to dismantle a number of economic controls in return for loans and guarantees from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Under this pressure, Indian governments began to loosen the bureaucratic straitjacket that bound the economy. Telecommunications was one of these areas. Indians in India and overseas desperately wanted a better phone system; international capitalism wanted a freer Indian economy.

The preamble to the National Telecom Policy of 1994 (NTP-94) captured the themes:

The new economic policy … aims at improving India’s competitiveness in the global market and rapid growth of exports[,] … attracting foreign direct investment and stimulating domestic investment … It is, therefore, necessary to give the highest priority to the development of telecom services …

The objectives of the new policy
were ‘telecommunications for all, … universal service covering all villages, … telecom services … of world standard’ and the transformation of India into a ‘major manufacturing base and major exporter of telecom equipment’.
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NTP-94 noted the scale of the task. It estimated that there were 8 phones for every 1000 people. The waiting list for a phone had grown to 2.5 million. Only one in four of the 580,000 villages had a telephone (and was it working?). And in spite of the improved accessibility resulting from the Public Call Offices of the late 1980s, there were still only 100,000 PCOs for a country of 900 million people. The new policy aimed to eliminate the waiting list, put phones in every village, have 1.9 million Public Call Offices by 1997 and ‘raise the telecom service in India to international standard’. How was this to be done? ‘Private investment … would be needed in a big way to bridge the resource gap’.
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