How the cell phone revolution can raise millions out of poverty, promote clean energy, and help fix the climate
Squatting in a dusty field in the village of Rataul, two hours north of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a young woman, like uncounted generations of women before her, is shaping a small mountain of cow dung into Frisbee-size cakes that will fire the family’s cookstove. Perhaps she will make a couple of phone calls before preparing dinner, using her new mobile. She’ll get a five-bar signal: barely a hundred yards away, across a patch of waste ground where some water buffalo are nosing around in the dirt, is a tall, slender cell phone tower. The photovoltaic panels that power it glitter in the late-morning sunlight. That strip of waste ground is a bridge between past and future, and hundreds of millions of Indians may now be poised to cross it.
Ask any Indian to name the quintessential symbol of the bad old days, the era of rigid state control of the economy and stultifying bureaucracy, and the answer will often be simple: getting a telephone.
