India Has More Mobile Phones Than Toilets

I'm still looking....

A UN study on santitation reported last week that India has more mobile phones than toilets:

563.73 million mobile phones out of a population of just over 1.2 billion, or about 1 phone for every two people.

By contrast, only 366 million people in India have access to what the UN termed proper sanitation.

It puts the phrase, I'm going to put you on hold into a whole new context.

While the UN doubtless published the comparison to drive home the point about the state of India's sanitation, it also demonstrates a fascinating commitment to the new digital age.

First, it speaks volumes about where people put their priorities.

All of these people, across all economic and social barriers, have been empowered to some extent, in the new digital age to both communciate, and latterly, I think, to create.

They are wired in, in an era in which wires are no longer necessary.

What India has done, or rather what the individual Indians have done, of their own accord, is to connect themsevles both to each other and to the greater world.

Now, the vast majority of them may only be using the phones to call home or to talk to their friends, which is most likely, but by being wired together, India has inadvertantly built an incredibly powerful machine for the instant manufacture of content.

Most mobile phones have cameras and in the next few years they are all going to have video.

600 million video cameras (or still cameras, or text generators) strung across India means that now everyone has a potential voice in the creation of India's footprint in the digital information marketplace.

There was a time when National Geographic could sell issues by putting a photo of an untouchable from Varanasi on their cover. Very exotic.

No more.

Now that everyone has a mobile and a camera - or soon will, it is going to create a level playing field, so to speak, for world participation.

It is also going to kill National Geographic, if it isn't dead already.

It's a new world.

So long as you don't need a toilet.