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.
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.
The influence of smartphones on "the world's largest democracy" is nonetheless pervasive and irreversible, and India Connected reveals both its dimensions and its implications.
Industry Reviews
"This is, quite simply, the best book about India today. It recounts the hard data but also captures the mood of a rising, sprawling, dynamic society. It is centered on the smartphone, which is indeed transforming the world's largest democracy. But the nature of that transformation is complex and nuanced. And Agrawal describes this reality with a novelist's eye and pen. A triumph." --Fareed Zakaria, CNN host and author of The Post-American World
"The smartphone may well rank among fire and electricity in terms of sheer impact on humanity. And as Ravi Agrawal argues in this book, there are few places in the world that have experienced that revolution as forcefully as India. Like no one else, Agrawal highlights just how far India has come with the smartphone, and how much further it can go. A read as entertaining as it is informative." --Ian Bremmer, president and founder, Eurasia Group
"The automobile unleashed American freedom and energy. The smartphone is doing the same for India. To understand why India will succeed, read this fascinating book. Modern India leaps out of its pages." --Kishore Mahbubani, Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore
"Agrawal's account is illuminating, eye-opening, and, like the phones it describes, smart. An engaging read!" --Shashi Tharoor, Indian MP from Thiruvananthapuram and author of Inglorious Empire
"India Connected is a must-read for everyone who is interested in contemporary India."
--Amitav Ghosh, author of Sea of Poppies and The Great Derangement
"An engaging storyteller, Ravi Agrawal charts the extraordinary changes and the new hopes cheap smartphones and digital technology are bringing to the day-to-day lives of ordinary Indians." --Mira Kamdar, author of Mobita's Tattoos and India in the 21st Century
"The story of how India has gotten wired is one of the most important in the world, and you'll find no better guide than Ravi Agrawal. He's dug in to give us a story of optimism, intrigue, and profound change. I read it straight through and I suspect you will too." --Nicholas Thompson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired
"Timely and absorbing... What makes this book so hard to put down is the way Agrawal skilfully weaves together the tales of ordinary Indian lives being transformed by digital technology."--Financial Times
"[A] smart, sympathetic and highly readable account."--Oliver Balch, The New Statesman
"A convincing case of how smartphones are creating a brand-new social infrastructure that did not previously exist in India."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Superb... Agrawal... has the journalist's knack of finding fascinating stories."
--Literary Review
"The stories in India Connected are timeless, and will age well into nice snapshots of history."--India Today
