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Dilip D'Souza

I Don't Mean Sexually Transmitted Disease

The journey I've just returned from featured, one morning, a bus trip that was both bone-jarring and ear-splitting. The condition of the roads, of the bus and our seats at the trampolining rear of the bus contributed to the first. The condition of the roads, the incessant rattling and the deafening engine of the bus -- even as heard all the way at the rear -- were responsible for the second. At our destination for the morning, we stumbled off the bus gratefully, if more than a little dazed. Only to be assaulted by the fierce sun at noon as we wobbled up to the 11th century temple we had come to see.

It took several long gulps of water, a squirrel that nibbled industriously at one of our Polo mints, and a lunch of puri-bhaji to restore our spirits. My hearing, I'm convinced, is beyond restoration.

But as it was deteriorating on that bus, I found a thought entering my mind: when I regularly travelled by bus through rural India, about 20 years ago, the buses were just as terrible. As were the roads, as were the dust and heat. Those journeys were every bit as loud and shimmying as this one. The sad truth is, rural India's buses and roads and dust are at least the same, more likely worse, than two decades ago.

In these 20 years, we have seen: The arrival of the Maruti and any number of sleek four-wheelers in its wake. The age of the computer, the Internet, the fax machine, the cellular phone. McDonald's and Baskin Robbins, Patek Philippe and Benetton, Levi's and Channel [V]. In some ways, India of the late '90s is utterly transformed from the India of the late '70s. Such a lot has changed.

Isn't it simply astonishing, then, that in those very 20 years, the conditions available to 75% of India have remained just the same? Not a thought has been directed at making travel even slightly easier for those 750 million Indians. There is a profusion of more modern cars. But in our smelly, disorganised bus stations, you will find no buses that can more comfortably take you down the roads -- roads that remain just as potholed and pockmarked as always.

Despite this dismal beginning to this column, I'm actually leading up to one great change all over India, in rural areas as well: a change I think is certainly for the better. Across our cities, in the smaller towns and villages, at every petrol station and even minor intersection on the highways, you will find what is surely our newest cultural icon. You never have to look far to see that familiar black-on-yellow sign: more often than not, you'll see two or more. In the tiny village on the edge of Gujarat's Rann of Kutch where I found myself a few days ago, I had to walk less than five minutes to locate the local STD-ISD-PCO booth.

Those few of you to whom those acronyms mean nothing, don't worry. Here's all you need to know. From that sleepy spot, where even five years ago I would have been utterly cut off from the rest of the world, I could lift a phone, dial a dozen or so digits and within seconds, be speaking to my friend Tito in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

I spared Tito the surprise. Instead, I dialed the next village to ask about being picked up, and even that's awe-inspiring. Five years ago I would have been utterly cut off from the next village.

I felt it on this trip more than previously: the spread of STD booths is one of the great unsung transformations of the Indian scene. They aren't pretty, they certainly disfigure their surroundings -- but who cares? They are effective. In fact, I'd even venture to say that they have moulded India's always-maligned phone system into possibly the world's most conveniently used, at least if you are calling long-distance.

Consider: if you're a tourist, there is no more difficult country to call long-distance in than that vanguard of high-tech, the USA. Either you must keep stuffing quarters into a slot, or nothing. You can't even buy an art-deco collectible pre-paid telecard, as you can in Europe or Israel. Not that that's always easy: you have to know you can do that, you have to know where you can get one.

But in India, you are never far from a STD booth. There, you dial, you speak, you check the display, you pay your money, you're on your way. The concept is so startlingly simple that you wonder why something like it isn't available in those advanced parts of the globe.

There is a reason, of course. STD booths need to be manned. Labour remains cheap enough in India that keeping one manned, even round the clock, is viable. That does not apply in the advanced countries. But in India, the side benefit to the STD boom is that it has brought jobs to tens of thousands of people. Small jobs, hard work, long hours, yes, but jobs nevertheless. Those people make good money.

About a year ago, I chatted about STD booths with Dr S Ramani, head of Bombay's National Centre for Software Technology. He estimated that there were 60,000 booths in India, employing about 200,000 people, generating about a sixth of India's telecom revenues. That sixth is no mere poultry feed; both the 60,000 and the 200,000 have certainly increased since. Hundreds of millions who have never had access to phone service are now only minutes from a booth.

But there may yet be more in the STD bag. The wide reach of the booths offers a readymade skeleton for something Dr Ramani and I discussed: let's call it hybrid email. Oh yes, some astute booth owners have already added the word "Internet", or "email", to their black-on-yellow signs: they offer net access from the very same booths via a dialup account. I have a friend who reaches me just this way when he visits India.

But hybrid email is a far more exciting prospect. That's because it can, in theory at least, reach all Indians -- not just those with Pentiums on their desks and a Zyxel under their phones.

This is how it might work. We give each of those 60,000 booths a number. Let's say you want to send an urgent message to your Aruna Chitti, resident in Sengottai in deep southern Tamil Nadu. You walk into the nearest STD booth and give the guy behind the counter her address. He looks it up in a booth directory and tells you: "You want booth number 45678." You type in your message, or it is scanned in, whatever. You pay your charge, perhaps ten rupees. In minutes, your message clatters forth from the printer in Sengottai's booth 45678, which caters to Aruna Chitti's neighbourhood. There, a delivery man takes ten messages at a time, gets on his bicycle and delivers them. He collects five rupees for his trouble from Aruna Chitti and the others.

For fifteen rupees, and within only minutes, you have sent your Chitti a message it would cost you three or four times as much to send by courier, far more by fax. What's more, at each of the country's STD booths, a man on a bicycle has got a job.

The thing about such a system is, it can be built now, on top of our existing phone system and STD booths. We don't need fancy-shmancy information highways, ISDN lines snaking everywhere and such like; and anyway those are frightfully expensive. We have to link the booths, that's all. Once that's done, the robust features of email -- that it is patient, it will dial again and again, it will try to retransmit if there are errors, it will find alternate routes to Sengottai -- make up for the flimsiness of the underlying phone system.

What STD booths have shown is that while people wait for individual phone lines -- which are expensive to install -- they can share the local booth. In much the same way, people don't need to have individual Internet accounts -- they can use a form of email by sharing the local booths. Just as with phone service, STD booths might one day bring email service to millions.

And on those millions of counts, the man who dreamed up the idea of STD booths deserves a gold medal. That it is so wildly successful is a tribute to what he must have had faith in: good old-fashioned private enterprise.

That's reason enough to put that enterprise to work in various other fields as well. Me, I'm plumping for the roads.

Dilip D'Souza