Mobile Phones in Sri Lanka: Everyman’s new trousers?
This is the title of my latest op ed essay, published this week on Groundviews, the leading citizen journalism website in Sri Lanka.
In this, I try to place in a social and cultural context a series of discriminatory laws, regulations and taxes that my native Sri Lanka has introduced – or threatened – in the past few months all aimed at mobile phones, and only mobiles.
This, despite the fact that the proliferation of mobiles has brought telecom services within reach of millions of Sri Lankans in the past decade, helping raise the country’s overall tele-density (mobiles+fixed phones) to 54 telephones per 100 population. With over 11 million SIMs issued, mobiles today outnumber fixed phones by three to one.
In my essay, I cite specific examples, and ask the crucial questions:
Why is this already licensed and regulated technology often targeted for ‘special treatment’ by different arms of government?
Where is this wide-spread suspicion and hostility towards mobiles coming from?
I argue that it is rear-guard action by the traditional elite and bureaucracy who’d rather not allow such digital empowerment to spread. And this has historical parallels.
Here’s the crux of it:
“There is a numerically small (but influential) privileged class that resents information and communication access becoming universal. They might talk glibly in public on using ICTs for social development or poverty reduction. But back inside the corridors of power, they make policies and regulations to undermine the very utility of these tools. This is no accident.
“The mobile phone is the biggest social leveller in Sri Lankan society since the trouser became ubiquitous (initially for men, and belatedly for women). Our elders can probably recall various arguments heard 30 or 40 years ago on who should be allowed to wear the western garb: it was okay for the educated and/or wealthy mahattayas, but not for the rest. Absurd and hilarious as these debates might seem today, they were taken very seriously at the time.
“Make no mistake: the mobile is the trouser of our times –- and thus becomes the lightning rod for class tensions, petty jealousies and accumulated frustrations of an elite that sees the last vestiges of control slipping away.”
Read the full essay on Groundviews
Relevant to this discussion is a short film that TVE Asia Pacific produced for LIRNEasia in late 2007, summarising the findings of the latter’s large sample survey on tele-use at the bottom of the pyramid in five emerging markets (which included Sri Lanka).
TVEAP News, Nov 2007: Film highlights telephone revolution in Asia’s emerging markets
Watch the film online:
Teleuse@BOP – Part 1 of 2
Teleuse@BOP – Part 2 of 2
Photo courtesy TVE Asia Pacific
Open Minds! (formerly: Moving Images blog) 