Mobile Phones Provide Jobs in Rural Areas

The mobile phone is enabling people at the bottom of the pyramid to widen their markets.

For instance, it provides vendors timely information about crowd gatherings, a potential market. It comes in handy for the watermelon vendor during the nine months of off-season when he can find work as a repairman.

Indeed, thousands of artisans are finding that the mobile connects them to their markets and even opens new markets for them.

These and other benefits of mobile phone in rural areas were the focus in the discussion at the Telecom CEO Conclave organised by Bharat Exhibitions on Friday in Delhi.

Video would be the most popular and relevant application in the rural telecom scenario, and mobile service providers must go for multiple uses of the mobile based on a combination of voice and video, and not so much data, asserted leading telecom executives at the conclave.

"In the rural context, it would be voice messaging, not SMS, that would be popular," said K Sridhara, member of Technology, DOT, Ministry of Communications & IT. He rejected the contention that rural users are too poor to pay for mobile services, quoting his own observations in remote areas.

Sridhara observed that the Indian telecom network was already better than that in many other countries. He urged service providers to offer VoIP. "Indian innovators should develop software like Skype to compete with it and enable an Indian answer to provide low-cost long distance voice services," he said.

Presenting three rural scenarios where people at the bottom of the pyramid were benefiting from use of the mobile phone, Bharti Airtel’s Vice President Technology T. V. Sriram mentioned Kerala fishermen, watermelon sellers, and itinerant balloon sellers as case studies.

The use of the mobile phone enabled them to widen their market, locate customers, and raise their revenue so that it more than paid for the cost of using the service, he explained.