India Connected How the Smartphone is Transforming the World's Largest Democracy

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 driven 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.

Ravi Agrawal is an award-wining journalist who has worked for CNN for over a decade in London, New York, and New Delhi.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: India's Great Connect

PART 1 - OPPORTUNITY
CHAPTER 1: FROM YOUR LIPS TO GOOGLE'S EARS
Women and the smartphone
CHAPTER 2: HELLO EDUCATION
Bridging the learning gap
CHAPTER 3: INDIA'S MOBILITY
The gig economy and job creation

PART 2 - SOCIETY
CHAPTER 4: TRUE, MAD, LOVE
Dating and marriage in the small screen era
CHAPTER 5: SEARCHING FOR SUNNY
The rise of pornography
CHAPTER 6: WHATSAPP-ENING IN INDIA?
Fake news and the problem with hyper-connectivity

PART 3 - THE STATE
CHAPTER 7: BIG BROTHERS
Internet shutdowns, and Facebook vs India
CHAPTER 8: "DEMONETIZATION"
A shock war on cash, and the rise of digital wallets
CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSION: How we got here . . . and where it's going