Former chief CNN India correspondent and award-wining journalist
Ravi Agrawal takes readers on a journey across the Subcontinent,
through its remote rural villages and its massive metropolises,
seeking out the nexuses of change created by smartphones, and with
them connection to the internet. As always with India, the numbers
are staggering: in 2000, 20 million Indians had access to the
internet; by 2017, 465 million were online, with three Indians
discovering the internet every second. By 2020, India's online
community is projected to exceed 700 million, and more than a
billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. In the course of
a single generation, access to the internet has progressed from
dial-up connections on PCs, to broadband access, wireless, and now
4G data on phones. The rise of low-cost smartphones and cheap data
plans has meant the country leapfrogged the baby steps their
Western counterparts took toward digital fluency. The results can
be felt in every sphere of life, upending traditions and customs
and challenging conventions. Nothing is untouched, from arranged
marriages to social status to business start-ups, as smartphones
move the entire economy from cash-based to credit-based. Access to
the internet is affecting the progress of progress itself. As
Agrawal shows, while they offer immediate and sometimes
mind-altering access to so much for so many, smartphones create no
immediate utopia in a culture still riven by poverty, a caste
system, gender inequality, illiteracy, and income disparity.
Internet access has provided greater opportunities to women and
changed the way in which India's many illiterate poor can interact
with the world, but it has also meant that pornography has become
more readily available. Under a government keen to control content,
it has created tensions. And in a climate of hypernationalism, it
has fomented violence and even terrorism. The influence of
smartphones on "the world's largest democracy" is nonetheless
pervasive and irreversible, and India Connected reveals both its
dimensions and its implications.
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