03 March 2016

India Calling

Mobile phones haven’t taken the spice out of India’s headlines.

By Neil Tidmarsh

How much did you pay for that smartphone in your pocket?  A hundred quid?  Two hundred quid?  Six hundred?  I’m sure you’ll insist that it was worth every penny.  In fact it’s almost priceless now that it’s more or less become an extra limb.  After all, how could you put a value on an arm or a leg? And yet…

Last week, a new smartphone – running on Android, with a 4in screen, 8GB internal storage, 3G, camera, the works – went on the market for £2.50.

This is the Freedom 251, offered by the Indian telecoms company Ringing Bells.  It is manufactured in India, following the prime minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign, and will come loaded with apps promoting government initiatives.  The response to the phone’s launch crashed the company’s website.

Narendra Modi has been promoting technology’s place in his country’s economic boom since he was elected in 2014.  His Digital India campaign seems to be working; India now has more than a billion mobile phone subscribers, second only to China.  And India’s embrace of the mobile phone is certainly generating some colourful headlines.

This week, women were banned from owning mobile phones in the village of Suraj, in Narendra Modi’s home state, Gujarat.  The village elders argue that using phones makes them neglect their domestic chores.  Any woman breaking the ban will be fined 2100 rupees (£22).  A reward will be given to anyone who reports ban-breakers.

“Why do girls need cell-phones?” said Mr Devshi Vankar, the village leader, quoted in The Times. “Girls should better utilise their time for study and other works. Community leaders felt that, just like liquor, the use of mobile phones by unmarried women was a nuisance to society. The internet is a waste of time and money.”

To be fair, the village is also planning to ban school-age boys from using mobile phones.  But the idea is spreading; women under the age of 18 have already been banned from using mobile phones in Basauli, a village in Uttar Pradesh.

Also this week, police in Mumbai have banned the taking of ‘selfies’ in sixteen areas of the city. Dangerous areas, where taking a selfie might literally be the last thing you do.  Last month an eighteen year old girl drowned when she fell into the sea at Bandstand Fort, one of Mumbai’s most picturesque landmarks, apparently while trying to take a selfie in a spectacular location.  Anyone breaking the ban (and presumably surviving) will be fined 1200 rupees (£13).

There have been forty-nine selfie-related deaths around the world in the last two years.  And nineteen of them have been in India.  They include an 18 year old student who drowned at a dam near the city of Nashik last month (a friend who tried to save him also drowned), and three students posing in front of a speeding locomotive in 2014.  Following Mumbai’s lead, other local authorities are considering the imposition of ‘no selfie’ zones as well.

You may have seen, in today’s newspaper, a bizarre photograph of hundreds of young men taking an exam.  It’s bizarre because they are all stripped to their underpants, and sitting in a field.  They’re hoping to be recruited into the Indian army, and are taking one of the entrance tests.  They’re in their underpants so they can’t use mobile phones – or any other concealed cribs – to cheat.  Cheating has proved a big problem for army examiners in the state of Bihar in north east India.  Ordinarily the candidates would be frisked to make sure they weren’t smuggling in such devices, but so many turned up that it would have taken too long.  It was quicker to get them to strip instead.

Cheating in India is an age-old problem, a symptom of the huge pressure on children to achieve good exam results at school and for adults to win the secure and well-paid public sector jobs available competitively.  Mobile phones are just the latest tool to be abused for it.  Last week in the western state of Gujarat, the authorities blocked mobile phone internet services while entrance exams for government jobs were underway.

Of course, the use of mobile phones generates headlines in the UK as well: a statue in the precinct of Salisbury cathedral had to be moved last week because people busy texting on their phones while walking kept bumping into it; this week the newspapers warned “don’t keep your mobile in the front pocket of your jeans, lads, or your sperm-count will plummet”; and every week they tell us not to let our kids use their phones just before going to bed or they’ll have trouble getting to sleep, etc.  But it’s pretty mild stuff, isn’t it? All pretty bland compared to the above, those spicy offerings from India. A rain-sodden packet of fish and chips compared to a bright, colourful, pungent and eye-wateringly hot vindaloo.

Did you see Patrick Hennessey’s ‘Kipling’s Indian Adventure’ on BBC Two a few weeks ago?  Its examination of nineteenth century India and nineteenth century England showed that they’re both pretty much vanished worlds.  But in spite of digital technology’s threat to homogenise the world in the twenty-first century, could Rudyard Kipling still be right when he insists “Oh, East is East and West is West…”?

 

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