In addition to economic status, the paper suggests that mobiles have a positive effect on social ties and relationships.
Amid reports of the harmful effects of excessive cellphone use, here is something good to say about mobile phones. The poor in metro cities have gained financially by using cellphones, says a working paper by two researchers of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).
The paper on 'Effect of Mobiles on Socio-economic Life of Urban Poor' states that nearly 60% of the slum-dwellers surveyed in Delhi, Ahmedabad and Kolkata, had reported improvement in their economic status in the last one year. These respondents also happened to be regular users of cellphones.
Despite the fact that the urban poor perceived cellphones as an investment rather than luxury, use of mobiles has helped them improve their income, states the paper by Ankur Sarin and Prof Rekha Jain of IIMA.
Their paper states that a majority of respondents of the survey believe that the use of mobiles had led to an improvement in their economic health and that these benefits more than offset the cost of mobile ownership and usage.
The researchers conducted a survey in 84 slum pockets of the three cities mentioned above with a sample size of 1,774 people. Of the 1,234 mobile users surveyed, around 47% of the respondents said their economic situation had 'improved somewhat' and around 13% said it had 'improved a lot'. But around 28% of non-users among the urban poor said their economic health had 'improved somewhat' and only 4% said it had 'improved a lot'.
Not surprisingly, transaction intensive activities that require intensive communication and gathering of information are most impacted by mobiles, the paper states. For example, nearly 60% of all respondents engaged in self-employed activities reported to have gained from cellphone use. The users said that use of mobiles not only on reduced costs otherwise incurred on work such as travel, finding out about prices and the like, but also improved their ability to co-ordinate with the people they work with, the researchers say in the paper.
The phones enabled them to work over larger geographical areas and avoid use of intermediaries in transactions, states the paper.
One of the striking ways in which mobiles appear to influence work practices is the ability of users to find work or jobs directly and without intermediaries.
Nearly 29% of user households have used cellphones to contact doctors and 21% to contact a person working in the government or a government office. In addition to economic status, the paper suggests that mobiles have a positive effect on social ties and relationships also by helping users keep in touch with family members and friends over long distances.
According to the paper, on an average, respondents reported spending around Rs2,700 to start using a mobile phone -Rs2,385 being the average expenditure on a handset and Rs 285 on talk time. Given that the average household earnings per month among users is Rs6,436 and among the non-users surveyed it is Rs4,373, it is not surprising that despite rapid reduction in the cost of mobiles and their use, the primary barrier to mobile usage among slum-dwellers still remains financial.
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