THE MOBILE ADVANTAGE

Cheap handsets, internet penetration and affordable data have placed a mobile phone in almost every hand in the country

- M.G. ARUN

THE DRUDGERY

On July 31, 1995, when the then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu made India's first mobile phone call from Writers' Building in Kolkata to the then Union telecom minister Sukh Ram at the Sanchar Bhawan in New Delhi, little did anyone know the instrument would become a great leveller in the next few decades. Certainly not when you had to dish out roughly Rs 4,900 for a pre-paid SIM card and pay a calling rate of Rs 17 per minute at peak traffic hours for incoming or outgoing calls, beyond the purse of the aam aadmi. Internet telephony? Beyond the pale of their imagination. The advent of 3G in 2001 brought with it global roaming, email and video streaming on mobile phones, and that of 4G in 2012, high definition (HD) streaming, social media, and interactive apps. But the cost of mobile data was still Rs 269 per GB in March 2014.

THE EASE OF LIVING