PALLIPURAM, INDIA, October 15, 2006: The cell phone is bringing new economic clout, profit and productivity to India’s fishermen who can take bids on their catch before reaching shore, farmers with their perishable crops and millions of poor laborers in India, the world’s fastest-growing cell phone market. the beginning of 2000, India had 1.6 million cell phone subscribers; today there are 125 million — three times the number of land lines in the country. With 6 million new cell phone subscribers each month, industry analysts predict that in four years nearly half of India’s 1.1 billion people will be connected by cell phone. That explosive growth has meant greater access to markets, more information about prices and new customers for tens of millions of Indian farmers and fishermen.
A convenience taken for granted in wealthy nations, the cell phone 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 sheepherders, 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 cell phones — are used to combat poverty. “One element of poverty is the lack of information,” Prahalad said. “The cell phone gives poor people as much information as the middleman.” For less than a penny a minute – the world’s cheapest cell phone 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 cell-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 cell phone 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 cell phone.
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 cell phone 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 cell phones have become the “poor man’s phone.”