NEW DELHI (AFP) — amidst all the financial gloom, one commerce is still successful -- India's mobile phones -- thanks to the world's lowly call rates determined by fierce opposition among cellular operators, experts say."India represents a single mobile market where struggle is the highest and the tariffs are the lowest," T.V. Ramachandran, head of the Cellular Operators organization of India, told AFP.And it's not just affluent Indians who are trade phones in the world's fastest growing cellular marketplace -- India outstripped China last April.
Most of the growth has been driven by laborers, maids, drivers and other lowly rewarded people in cities and ever more in rural areas as ground-breaking advertising has made phoning low-priced sufficient for some of the poorest pockets."One of the major factors in this enlargement has been affordability both in conditions of handset and tariff plans," said Girish Trivedi, a senior psychotherapist at consultancy Frost & Sullivan.Customers can pay less than two cents for a call and 13 dollars for a new mobile handset. Second-hand ones can price far less. For many, mobile phones mean their livelihood. Sixty-two-year-old house painter Akshaye Jha runs his two-man big business in New Delhi from his mobile phone."It means people can get in stroke with me. I get more jobs," said Jha."The mobile has become a machine for the masses... an representative of change," transforming ways of communicating and doing commerce, Ramachandran said.
People are also buying phones even when they don't need them for work.
Munshi, a security guard, never learnt how to read facts and gets other people to call. He keeps his handset in his breast pocket and starts with shocker when it rings with a effervescent Hindi pop tune."It keeps me in touch with my family in the village," he smiles after getting a call from a nephew.
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