Housewives and children are among the highest cellphone users, shows survey

If you’ve got a bone to pick with your wife, who you think chats too much on the phone, you’ve now got statistics to back your argument. It appears that housewives chat so much on their cellphones that they form the second biggest occupational group of mobile users in urban areas, second only to labourers and daily wage earners.

A pan-India study on cell phone usage done by Juxt-Consult, a market research company, reveals that the time housewives spend talking on cellphones is higher than that of the corporate sector, self employed professionals and business owners put together.

If that has confirmed your worst fears, then there’s more. It’s possible that children in cities are not born with a silver spoon anymore, but rather with a mobile phone in their hands. The survey found that usage among children (0-12 years) is almost as high as among teenagers.

But the broader picture of India’s cellphone revolution is still rooted in rural areas, with the critical mass being middle and lower income groups. Bihar’s telecom circle for example, has the highest number of rural mobile subscribers (about 12%), higher than Mumbai’s telecom circle which has 10.4% of all urban mobile subscribers.

So if one were to draw a caricature of the typical Indian cell phone user (if there is one at all), it’d be someone who’s educated only up to school, either completely or for a large part in a non-English language. His mobile handset would probably be in the price range of Rs1,500-3,000, on a prepaid connection, equipped with at least an MP3 player/radio, games and camera. After purchase, the average time he’d spend talking daily would be a little under 23 minutes. His average monthly cellphone bill? He would tell you that it’s about Rs240 (You can choose not to believe him).

But that’s just as far as his caricature goes. This survey done between April-May this year (sample size: 2,59,341 individuals across 100 cities and 1,040 villages) came up with some surprising findings.

For example, while cell phones have reached various nooks and corners of the country, it appears that only 26% of all Indians are active users, a good 40% lesser than that claimed by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) figures of 600 million connections. Only 3% of those connections are post-paid ones, Juxt Consult further states.

Sanjay Tiwari, director, Juxt Consult said, “We’ve used primary data, measuring those mobile connections (SIMs), which are actively in use at the time of survey, not counting the ‘passive’ SIMs that may be still lying with subscribers un-surrendered and not being used actively. Trai data comes from secondary sources (telecom companies) counting all connections which may be either active, passive or not in use at all.”

Brand loyalty among users seems to be high, as two-third of those surveyed claimed they will not switch operators even if number portability comes into effect.