Why Is India So Dominant in the Demand for New Smart Feature Phones That Are Internet Connected?

In recent years, an innovation called the smart feature phone has brought the Internet to millions of poor people who would not otherwise have been able to go online. The purpose of this chapter is to show and explain why the new phones have spread most widely in India. Based on an analytical framework which uses a multi-sequential model with binary stages and data from the most recent annual survey by the GSMA (Global System for Mobile Communications) at each stage, the proximate cause appears to be the ultra-low cost at which the Indian device (the JioPhone) is sold and data are purchased. A more fundamental reason, however, was found to be the series of more or less coincidental series of events that brought together the OS software developer KaiOS Technologies and India’s largest conglomerate Reliance Industries, which heavily subsidized the JioPhone. This allowed the product to be sold for almost nothing and data costs were also exceptionally low. But the JioPhone would not have been so successful if India’s performance at other stages than costs had been signally poor. What data I could find, however, does not suggest that this was the case. The country, for example, enjoys complete 4G coverage, higher than average digital skills, and numerous examples of local content and relevance, and one of the available applications allows voice rather than text communications (which benefits the illiterate and the elderly).