Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Former chief CNN India correspondent and journalist Ravi Agrawal takes readers on a journey through the Subcontinent, both 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 2010 that number grew to 100 million; by 2015, 317 million were online, rising to 465 million in 2017, when three Indians were discovering the Internet every second; by 2020, India's online community is projected to exceed 700 million; more than a billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. In the course of a single generation--as access to the Internet has progressed from dial-up Internet connections on PCs, to broadband access, wireless, and now 4G data on phones--everything has changed. The rise of low-cost smartphones and cheap data plans has mean the country leapfrogged the babysteps their Western counterparts took toward digital fluency. The results can be felt in every space-cultural, economic, and political. It is affecting the progress of progress itself.
Agrawal talked with street-smartphone wallahs, ricksaw drivers, young couples trying to avoid arranged marriages, as well as entrepreneurs both minor and mogul, such as those trying to gain market share for Western giants like Uber and Google, as well as local start-ups disrupting the disrupters. Agrawal's clear-eyed style explores the full extent of what the Internet is doing in India. While it offers immediate and sometimes mind-altering access to so much to so many, it creates 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; it has also meant that pornography has become more readily available and even led to the propagation of fake news. Under a government keen to control content, it has created tensions. And in a climate of hypernationalism it has fomented violence and even terrorism. Regardless, the influence of smartphones on "the world's largest democracy" is undeniable and here is a book that explores, entertainingly and illuminatingly, both its dimensions and its implications.