India Connected

India is connecting at a dizzying pace. In 2000, roughly 20 million Indians had access to the internet. In 2017, 465 million were online, with three new people logging on for the first time every second. By 2020, the country's online community is projected to exceed 700 million; more than a billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. While users in Western countries progressed steadily over the years from dial-up connections on PCs, to broadband access, wireless, and now 4G data on phones, in India most have leapfrogged straight into the digital world with smartphones and affordable data plans.

What effect is all this having on the ancient and traditionally rural culture dominated by family and local customs? Ravi Agrawal explores that very question, seeking out the nexuses of change and those swept up in them. Smartphones now influence arranged marriages, create an extension of one's social identity that moves beyond caste, bring within reach educational opportunities undreamed of a generation ago, bridge linguistic gaps, provide outlets and opportunities for start-ups, and are helping to move the entire Indian economy from cash- to credit-based. The effects are everywhere, and they are transformative.

While they offer immediate access to so much for so many, smartphones are creating no utopia in a culture still struggling with poverty, illiteracy, corruption, gender inequality, and income disparity. Internet access has provided greater opportunities to women and altered how India's outcasts interact with the world; it has also made pornography readily available and provided an echo chamber for rumor and prejudice. Under a government determined 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 pervasive and irreversible, disruptive and creative, unsettling and compelling. Agrawal's fascinating book gives us the people and places reflecting what the internet hath wrought. India Connected reveals both its staggering dimensions and implications, illuminating how it is affecting the progress of progress itself.

"India is connecting at a dizzying pace. In 2000, roughly 20 million Indians had access to the Internet. In 2017, 465 million were online, with three new people logging on for the first time every second. By 2020, the country's online community is projected to exceed 700 million; more than a billion Indians are expected to be online by 2025. While users in Western countries progressed steadily over the years from dial-up connections on PCs, to broadband access, wireless, and now 4G data on phones, in India most have leapfrogged straight into the digital world with smartphones and affordable data plans. What effect is all this having on the ancient and traditionally rural culture dominated by family and local customs?"--Publisher marketing.

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