For the rural poor in India, cellphones come calling
Mobile phone usage is rising faster in India than
anywhere else in the world, with some six million customers added every month.
Rural India is the new frontier.
MUNDAWAR, Rajasthan: Friday evening, Mundawar played host to a jarring new visitor: Nokia’s traveling mobile phone van. Hundreds of spectators, most men and boys between the ages of 15 and 50, gathered outside or squeezed into the van, hoping to win free merchandise like a Nokia-branded hat.
Mobile phone usage is rising faster in India than anywhere else in the world, with some six million customers added every month…Rural India has become the next frontier for the industry’s biggest players. About 70 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population, 770 million people, live in villages and rural areas.
Nokia has sent two dozen vans staffed with sales representatives on continuous six-month treks through the countryside. The sales reps don’t take orders and they don’t sell phones; instead, their task is to explain why anyone in a small farming community would want a mobile phone in the first place, and a Nokia in particular.
“The object is to establish the concept of phones, and the need for phones,” said Suresh Sundaram, Nokia’s national retail marketing manager in India, who was in Mundawar on Friday with the van.
While fields dominate the landscape here, cellular connections are not a problem. “We can’t catch up to the rate that towers are set up,” Sundaram said.
Unlike the history of extending telephone access to rural America, there’s less inclination to leave it all in the hands of a “benevolent” monopoly like AT&T.
Posted: Sun - May 6, 2007 at 01:21 PM