Promoting Internet in rural India, a struggle

Babulal Singh Neti was sitting with his uncle on an afternoon, trying to persuade him of the merits of the Internet. The sun was beating down on the frazzled croplands.

His uncle said he had no use for the Internet, since he had never learned to read; furthermore, he wanted to nap. This he made clear by periodically screwing up his face into a huge yawn.

Neti, 38, pressed on, suggesting he could demonstrate the Internet’s potential by Googling the history of the Gond tribe, to which they both belonged. Since acquiring a smartphone, Neti couldn’t stop Googling things: the gods, Hindu and tribal; the relative merits of the Yadav caste and the Gonds; the real story of how the earth was made.

Access to this knowledge so elated him that he decided to give up farming for good, taking a job with a nongovernmental organisation whose goals include helping villagers produce and call up online content in their native languages. When he encountered Internet sceptics, he tried to impress them by looking up something they really cared about — like Gond history.

His uncle responded with half-closed eyes, delivering a brief but comprehensive oral history of the Gond kings, with the clear implication that his nephew was a bit of a good-for-nothing. “What does it mean, Google?” his uncle said. “Is it a bird?” And then, theatrically, he yawned.

While India produces some of the world’s best coders and computer engineers, vast multitudes of its people are like Neti’s neighbours, entering the virtual world with little sense of what lies within it, or how it could be of use to them. The arrival of the Internet in their lives is one of India’s most hopeful narratives.

Since independence, the government has done very little to connect Taradand, in Madhya Pradesh to the outside world. The first paved road appeared in 2006. There has never been a single telephone landline. Electricity is available to only half the houses. When Neti was growing up, if someone in the village needed emergency medical care, farmers tied the patient to a wooden cot and carried him five miles through the forest to the nearest hospital, a journey of four hours.

By comparison, the battling telecoms have wired Taradand with breathtaking speed. Two years ago, Neti counted 1,000 mobile phones in the village, which has a population of 2,500. This tracks with India as a whole; last year it surpassed the US to become the world’s second-largest market for mobile phones behind only China, according to Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA). With the cost of both smartphones and data plummeting, it is fair to assume that Taradand’s next technological leap will be onto the Internet.

Those who work in development tend to speak of this moment as a civilisational breakthrough, of particular significance in a country aching to educate its children. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made expanding Internet use a central goal, shifting government services onto digital platforms. When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg toured India in 2014, he told audiences that for every 10 people who get online, “one person gets lifted out of poverty and one new job gets created.”
So it is instructive to follow Neti as he tries to drum up a little interest in Taradand. Young men use the Internet here almost exclusively to circulate Bollywood films. Older people view it as a conduit for pornography and other wastes of time. Women are not allowed access even to simple mobile phones, for fear they will engage in illicit relationships; the Internet is out of the question.

Illiterate people — almost everyone over 40 — dismiss the Internet as not intended for them. Still, Neti persists with the zeal of the newly converted. “You can call me the black sheep,” he said cheerfully. “I don’t care. It’s the Internet age. One day they’ll all come around.”

Neti is, in some ways, an unlikely harbinger of technological change. His parents pulled him out of school in fifth grade to marry — his wife was 10 — and though he can read and write in Hindi, his school transcript brands him illiterate, foreclosing any opportunity to get a government job.

When he bought his first mobile phone in 2001, he was so nervous he did not make a call for a week. When he finally did, he blurted out: “Friend, I have bought this mobile. Is this your number and your name? I am Babulal!” The next day his phone stopped working and he returned to the shop, “I had no idea what to do,” Neti said. “The shopkeeper said, ‘Your balance is over.’”

But this experience in no way prepared Neti for his first encounter with the smartphone, which he spotted about a decade ago in the hand of a computer operator in Taradand’s local administration building. The official was an agreeable sort, and Neti began borrowing his phone for two- and three-hour stretches. He went on Google, searching for the word “Gondwana,” the name for the Gond tribe’s traditional land.

‘Bottomless sea’
Only after some time did Neti realise it was possible to search for terms other than Gondwana. “It seemed,” he said, “as if I was diving into a sea with no bottom to it.” Neti finds it maddening that, in a region whose farmers are desperate to educate their children, his neighbours still regard the Internet principally as a way to watch movies. “The villagers don’t know that the whole world rests inside the mobile. The day people realise that, they will stop going out to study.”

Neti does spend a lot of time online. Walking around the village, he stops periodically to take selfies and post them on Facebook, and he scrolls through his feeds compulsively. He likes to describe his smartphone as his “guru.” A friend from childhood, Markandeya Yadav, said it was difficult for him to keep up with Neti’s Internet discoveries. “He has changed, but I have not,” Yadav said.

The worst damage has been to Neti’s relationship with his wife, Sitabai, who comes from a far more remote village and is completely illiterate. She had taken to scrolling through images on her husband’s phone and, coming across a woman’s photograph, began calling numbers at random. She reached a senior district bureaucrat whose contacts he had programmed into the phone, and Neti had to beg the official’s forgiveness. After hanging up, he slapped her.

“My wife’s mentality is such that she lives in yesteryear,” he said. “If I tread her path, I will be left miles behind.” This view is typical of India: Men are 36% more likely to use a bare-bones mobile phone than are Indian women. Where the Internet is concerned, the gap between male and female use is even greater, at 62%.

At moments of discouragement, Neti recalls that Taradand has already accepted a new technology. Fifteen years ago, when people began using mobile phones, his neighbours were elated. They were more efficient in everything they did. It was no longer necessary to make long journeys to inform relatives of family news. Before going to market, farmers could call around to compare wholesale prices of vegetables. Migrant labourers could find out where the contractors were paying a higher wage.

Even Neti’s uncle, Siya Ram Singh Gond, shook his head gravely at the thought of how long they had lived without these tools. “So much time was wasted,” he said.