The smartphone revolution in India
In the following excerpt from India Connected: How the Smartphone is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy, Ravi Agrawal explains how the people of India are surpassing the evolution of technology experienced in the West and getting online at a staggering rate.
In New Delhi the city’s rich often shop and dine at a ramshackle area known as Khan Market. Inside, the lanes are narrow and dusty. Loose electric wires dangle ominously from walls. Stray dogs lie lazily on the pavement. But the shoddy exteriors are deceptive. In the market’s shops, one can buy everything from designer clothes to diamonds, exotic fruits to electronics. The restaurants and bars are among the capital’s swankiest. In large part because of its location — near Parliament and the homes of the superrich — Khan Market has the most expensive commercial real estate in the country.
Hidden behind the main shopping area is the market. This is where the household help, security guards, and drivers of Delhi’s elite come to shop. At twenty rupees (thirty cents), a cup of chai costs less than a tenth the price of a Starbucks latte in the main, posh market a few meters away.
Mohit Sadhwani runs a ten-square-foot establishment in mini Khan Market. He is just thirty years old. When unwitting foreigners wander by, Sadhwani exchanges dollars for rupees at extortionate rates. His real business, however, entails selling cheap phones and cellular plans to Delhi’s not-so-rich. Sadhwani is a phone wallah — like the chai wallah nearby. Sales are booming.
“No matter how poor, every Indian wants to have a smartphone in his hand,” he said, explaining how demand for the internet had made his devices more popular than before. “This is a revolution.”
Sadhwani has a point, especially when you compare India to the West. In America, for example, middle-class families began accessing the internet in the 1990s. Most households had personal computers and phone lines, so dial-up internet was a natural step forward. Then came broadband with faster and more reliable speeds. Routers and wireless internet followed soon after. Americans could now imagine the internet on the move: on laptops; across rooms in a connected home, office, or university. Cellular data was invented; people began using email on phones. Then came smartphones and wearable technology. All of this was part of a natural evolution
India’s experience has been different. Most Indians don’t own PCs or telephone landlines. And now they never will, as they leapfrog straight to the smartphone internet era. For the vast majority of Indians — mostly lower income, rural, or both — internet adoption has not been a steady, Western-style evolution. It is, as Sadhwani puts it, a revolution.
Consider the numbers. In 2000, only 20 million Indians had access to the internet. Ten years later, that number grew to 100 million. But 1.1 billion Indians were still offline. Then smartphones and cellular data became mainstream. By 2015, 317 million were online, rising to 462 million in 2017, when three Indians were discovering the internet every second. Women, however, were still left behind: fewer than a third of India’s internet users were female. This too will change.
By 2020, India’s online community is projected to swell past 700 million — about the combined populations of Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States. Nearly a billion Indians are expected to have used the internet by 2025.
This mass discovery of the internet may be a revolution, but it is an unlikely revolution. For all the talk of India as a fast-growing global economic power, it remains a very poor nation. In 2016, per capita income in India was only $1,709 a year. The average Chinese worker made nearly five times as much: $8,123 a year. Mexican? $8,201. American? $57,466. The question, then, is how the average Indian can afford an Apple iPhone with a voice and data contract that costs an annual $800 in the West. The answer is that he (and increasingly she) doesn’t need to.
Ravi Agrawal is the managing editor of Foreign Policy. Previously, he worked for CNN for 11 years in full-time roles on three continents-including a four-year stint as New Delhi bureau chief. Agrawal was born in London, grew up in Kolkata, and attended college at Harvard. He splits his time between Brooklyn and Washington, DC.
