India Connected

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. <p/>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. <p/>The influence of smartphones on the world's largest democracy is nonetheless pervasive and irreversible and <em>India Connected</em> reveals both its dimensions and its implications.<br>