Institute For The Future

Pervasive Headache

"While the mobile phone may have celebrated its 10th birthday in India, this month, foreign travelers to the country will undoubtedly find it a pervasive headache to purchase the device and buy minutes. In India, you must present both a government-issued identification and a current photograph just to purchase a prepaid SIM card. Why are the rules so stringent? The Indian government justifies the controls by claiming, "mobiles have been used in terror plots." Consider this: Rod and I bought cell phones in New Dehli. The transaction was fairly easy for me because I still carry a valid Indian driver's license. Rod, on the other hand, needed our research partner (a professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University) to vouch for his identity.

But the ordeal doesn't end, there.

By the time we'd moved on to Calcutta, we were ready to add minutes. We bought a money card worth Rs 1100 (about 25$US). Problem solved, right? Not so fast. Evidently, a Calcutta money card can't boost the minutes of a New Dehli mobile phone. Huh?

Thus began a new series of adventures -- bartering with shopkeepers to take our money card and add time to our phones via their own. Apparently, that's the way it's done. Score another point for the social network.

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