Strong signals for trade

In Chanderi, the Madhya Pradesh town that gives its name to the region’s exquisite fabric, Muzaffar Ansari’s family of weavers is busy working on an order for silk saris from Jaipur. Barely a while ago, he had sent images of samples to the sari dealer using WhatsApp on his smartphone. The designs were approved instantly and the family of six set to work on the saris, which will be ready in three weeks. While Ansari and his son work on the two looms in their house, others in the family assist in warping, braiding and other processes. Like many weaver families in the region, the Ansaris today earn about ₹800 a day — a sharp increase from the ₹50 they scraped together until seven years ago. This change in fortune was brought about mainly through mobile phones.

Miles away in Bengaluru, Murugan can’t stop smiling at his luck. The owner of a single taxi until last year, he now operates a fleet of 10 in the IT city. His ally in this rapid expansion: a smartphone with the Uber Partner app on it. Seated in his office, Murugan manages his drivers and tracks their real-time movement using his smartphone. They cannot dupe him about the number of trips they make or their location. “I owe my success to the mobile phone,” he declares. His daily income: over ₹25,000, including his incentives for clocking at least 12 trips for each vehicle every day.

Affordably priced from ₹4,000 onwards and packing an array of useful features, smartphones are increasingly driving small businesses and entrepreneurs, boosting their income as well as visibility. From fishermen in coastal Kerala and Tamil Nadu to the microfinance official making the rounds of villages in interior Andhra Pradesh, all of them are clutching gratefully at their smartphones.

Mobile slays middleman

Osama Manzar, the founder of Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), points out that in traditional skill-based clusters like Chanderi, Benares and Murshidabad (all famous silk-weaving centres), mobiles and smartphones have proliferated rapidly. “And that has impacted access to market information. Weavers now know where an exhibition is taking place, what buyers are looking for and the prevailing market rates for their products.”

Ansari’s family has been in the weaving profession for seven centuries; today, armed with smartphones, they have eliminated three kinds of middlemen. “To begin with, we didn’t know about the price or availability of raw materials — cotton and silk — and needed the middlemen to procure them. Now, from the internet we find out on our own the most reasonable price for a commodity,” he says.

Even better, he no longer travels to Jaipur, Kolkata or Benares or approaches a middleman to get his sari designs approved. “I send my pictures over mobile and modifications, if any, are also discussed with clients over phone. This has saved us time and improved productivity,” he adds.

Sharing this veteran weaver’s upbeat outlook is Ismaeel, a sari designer in his 20s, who works on a computer and negotiates directly over phone with buyers. “My monthly income has gone up from ₹1,500 to over ₹10,000,” he says.

He has a Facebook page for his designs and updates it regularly using his mobile phone. “It is easy to click pictures of my products on my smartphone and upload them on my page. The feedback is quick, as buyers comment on them immediately, helping us improve the designs,” he says.

Earlier, he sold through middlemen and remained clueless about the final selling price. Not anymore. “I am not being exploited by middlemen as my forefathers were. I sell through my Facebook page as well as through Chanderiyaan (a website supported by DEF). The money comes to my account automatically and I don’t even have to visit the bank to deposit cash,” he says.

Cash registers are beeping

For Murugan, too, banking chores are a thing of the past. “I don’t have to step out of my office to receive money from Uber. The company makes weekly transfers to my account. Even my vehicle instalments are deducted automatically by the bank. I get SMS alerts on my mobile for all the transactions,” he adds.

Yet another theatre for this mobile revolution is the microfinance sector, where the palmtops have greatly improved loan disbursal, repayment collections and customer management. Deepak Ayare, chief information officer at Ujjivan Financial Services, says his firm’s loan disbursement rate has increased dramatically. Until a few years ago, Ujjivan barely managed to disburse 80,000 loans a month, slowed down by the intensive paperwork required. “Today we can comfortably manage three lakh loans a month,” says Ayare.

A field staff collecting repayments from clients makes the entries on a smartphone, and the system reflects this instantly. That, in turn, helps Ujjivan calculate the cash it needs for disbursal the next day. “Cash management has improved, and since we know how much money an agent is carrying, we sometimes send another staff member to collect cash from him before the end of the day,” says Ayare.

When there is no connectivity in a village, the agent makes entries on the smartphone and transmits them on entering a mobile network. From 400 a month, an agent today easily services 1,000 customers. “A customer’s data shows up the moment her ID is keyed into the system. Only the latest entry needs to be made, saving time, which is instead used to inform the customer about newer products or catering to more clients,” he adds.

Ujjivan is also using smartphones to educate agents. Rather than conducting hour-long training programmes in the office, which will lead to wasting an entire workday, Ujjivan prepares audio-video training modules and sends them to the agents’ smartphones. “They can watch them whenever they are free,” he says.

The microfinance company foots the bill for airtime and internet charges. As for the smartphone itself, the agents are given “a soft advance of ₹8,000 to buy them; we recover it in eight instalments”, Ayare says.

Message from rain gauge

Further south, in God’s Own Country, John Thekkayyam has set up Radio Monsoon to share weather and climate information with the fishing community. The service uses satellite data to predict weather five days ahead, including parameters like wave height, wind speed and direction, which are crucial for fishermen. Users dial a toll-free number from their mobiles and listen to the forecast in their local language or access it through Twitter and Facebook.

A handful of fishermen are also using their mobiles to find out fish prices in various coastal markets. Before even returning to shore, they are able to finalise the best deal for their day’s catch. There is another kind of catch, though. Joseph Xavier Kalapurakal, general secretary of the All Kerala Fishing Boat Operators Association, points out that at sea the mobile range is limited to 15km from shore. So its use is restricted as of now, he says.

Nevertheless, from sea to land, the mobile phone signals groundbreaking advances. Farmers depend on mobile alerts for rainfall and temperature forecasts and plan their farming activities accordingly. A service promoted by IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd allows farmers to dial a number to get their agriculture-related problems addressed by an expert. On the road, taxi drivers are profiting from their association with cab aggregators. At the micro-level, small businesses in Asia’s biggest slum, Dharavi, are using their mobiles to send products to online marketplaces like Snapdeal. As Manzar puts it, “Mobile is not a producer, but it gives access to information.” And information, as everyone knows, is power indeed.

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