A ctivity . In – , due to COVID- pandemic, lakhs and lakhs of children began using cell phone and attended online classes. How do you see this change sociologically? India’s Telecommunications Expansion When India gained Independence in , the new nation had , telephone lines for its population of million.
Thirty-three years later, by , India’s telephone service was still bad with only . million telephones and , public phones for a population of million; only per cent of India’s , villages had telephones. However, in the late 1990s, a sea change occurred in the telecommunication scenario: by , India had installed a network of over million telephone lines, spread across cities, , towns and , villages, making India’s telecommunication network the ninth largest in the world. …Between and , the number of villages with some kind of telephone facility increased from , to , (half of all villages in India).
By , some , public call offices (PCOs) provided reliable telephone service, where people can simply walk in, make a call, and pay the metered charges, had mushroomed all over India, including remote, rural, hilly, and tribal areas. The emergence of PCOs satisfies the strong Indian sociocultural need of keeping in touch with family members. Much like train travel in India, which is often undertaken to celebrate marriages, visit relatives, or attend funerals, the telephone is also viewed as a way of maintaining close family ties. Not surprisingly, most advertisements for telephony service show mothers talking to their sons and daughters, or grandparents talking to their grandchildren.
Telephone and cell phone expansion in India, thus, serves a strong sociocultural function for its users, in addition to a commercial one.