 one. Thank you all very much for joining us tonight. On behalf of the Asia Study Policy Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I'd like to welcome you. And we are here tonight to talk about and celebrate the launch of an incredible new book by my friend Ravi Agrawal. The book is India Connected, How the Smartphone is Transforming the World's Largest Democracy. So Ravi first outlined the premise of this book for me about maybe a year and a half ago, back when he was first working on it. And I'd invited him to come to DC and do a talk. And he said, I want to talk about some research I'm doing for a new book. It's about how the smartphone is transforming India. And my reaction at the time was sort of like, sure, that sounds interesting. But I really didn't appreciate, I don't think, the significance of what Ravi was talking about and why this was an important topic, until he sort of explained it in this way. He said, and if you read the book, which you absolutely should do, you'll see this. He says, imagine what the cars did for Americans. Imagine what the car did for an American. It connected people in a way that hadn't been possible before. Roads, highways that didn't used to exist transformed the landscape of the United States. New jobs, it opened up all kinds of new possibilities for where you could live, for where you could work. That's what the smartphone's going to do for India. And I never thought about it that way before. But when I did, I started to understand why the topic of this book was so important. Because for folks here in the United States, smartphones have been transformative, I would say. For most of us, we love our smartphones. We probably can't live without them. We have them on us at all times. We can't imagine trying to get from McLean to Silver Spring without the smartphone anymore. But it's a convenience. It's a convenience we're lucky to have. And Ravi's book really explains and argues how the smartphone sort of sparked what's more of a revolution in India. For poor Indians, suddenly you didn't have to know English to be able to use the internet anymore. You didn't even have to be able to read and write. And when you think about the fact that there are almost 300 million Indians who still can't read and write, you understand how powerful such a small device can be. And that's what I really love about this book, is that Ravi really talks to you about the macro impact of a technology by looking at the micro effect it has on people's day-to-day lives. He talks about how one device has the potential to change how Indians date and marry, how they do business, how they learn. And for better or for worse, as we've often seen, we begin to understand how technology can really transform a nation and a generation in such a small amount of time. So with that, I'd really like to introduce Ravi Agarwal, tonight's author. He is currently the managing editor for foreign policy. And prior to joining FP, Ravi was at CNN for over a decade. Most recently, he was their New Delhi bureau chief. But before that, he also worked for them as a senior producer in New York and in London. He has been honored with a Peabody Award and nominated for three Emmys. So with that, I would like to turn the floor over to Ravi and ask you to join me in welcoming him for tonight's conversation. Thanks very much. Thank you, all of you, for coming here. Thank you, Lindsay, for a very generous introduction. Lindsay and also Millan, who will be speaking with me shortly, both read the book many, many months ago and have been instrumental in bringing it to life. So thank you, both of you, thank you for organizing this event. I want to tell you a little bit more about my book, India Connected. And what I want to begin with is a bit of a comparison between India and the United States. And I'll run a set of comparisons, but the first one has to do with the internet. So all of you, and this is a guess, but I think I'm going to be right, all of you would have discovered the internet on a PC and a dial-up connection. Am I right? Anyone here who did not? Right. This would have likely been in the 1990s, maybe early 2000s, depending on how old you are. And then you sort of evolved with the internet and evolved with computing. So from the PC with the dial-up connection, you then graduated, as it were, to DSL and cable and broadband. And then routers were invented, and then you had wireless internet at home and your offices, in your schools and universities. And then around about that time, we began to see the advent of phones that had Edge and then 3G and then later on 4G. And today, we're at the stage where you have a smartphone with 4G connectivity, soon to be 5G, in which you can do a whole range of things. It's one of the most powerful computers if you look at the span of history. Now that seems like a very rapid development, but it really is an evolution. India has not gone through that same evolution. If you look at the masses, the hundreds of millions of Indians in that country, a few people did. So 2% of Indians in the year 1999 had PCs. A similar percentage of Indians had telephone lines. And so no surprise, only about 15 to 20 million Indians were online in the year 2000. They were restricted by the fact that access to PCs and telephone landlines was very restricted to mostly the rich or urban educated Indians. And they were also English speakers. So at the time, if you drew a Venn diagram between English speakers and internet users, there was either an intersection or all of the internet users were also English speakers. So if India would have continued that trajectory of going from PC to PC and dial-up connection to cable, DSL, broadband, and then wireless, India would have taken a long time to get online in a mass way, because PCs were not proliferating fast enough. Neither were telephone landlines. Along comes the cell phone revolution in the early 2000s, which then led to the smartphone revolution that we now have and the data revolution. And because of that, we are now at the stage where every second three Indians are discovering the internet. We've gone from 20 million Indians being online in the year 2000 to 100 million in 2010 to 300 million in 2015. You see the jump there, the acceleration, to nearly 500 million today. And the reason behind that acceleration is all smartphones. Hundreds of millions of Indians are getting online. No matter whether they're rural or urban, rich or poor, they're getting online because of smartphones. And that is a revolution. The West went through an evolution. India is going through a revolution. Why is this revolutionary for many reasons? India is still very poor. The average income in India is less than $2,000 a year, which is about less than a fourth that of China. It's less than a 30th that of the United States. So India is very poor. You can't really compare India's trajectory to China's trajectory because the Chinese, they got rich before they got online. So they had many people who were online with PCs before the smartphone revolution there took off. So that's a different experience as well. The only place you can really compare India to is maybe its neighbors or to the continent of Africa, where many people are discovering the internet in a similar way through smartphones. But of course, none of them are a country the size and scale and diversity that India is. And so if you think about the potential of this one device to really transform everything you see in India from access to efficiency, to productivity, to education, to the gig economy, all of these things, dating and marriage, as Lindsay mentioned, the smartphone could be a real catalyst for change because it is as revolutionary as it is. And it's not just a phone. For most Indians, this one device is also likely going to be their first camera. It's likely gonna be their first Walkman and MP3 player. It may even be their first video screen. It may even be their first alarm clock. That's how revolutionary this one cheap device is. And these aren't iPhone users in India. Only 1% of Indian smartphone users are iPhone users. They can't afford them. And iPhone retails in India for more than $1,000 when you factor in import duties. The phones that sell in India are cheap, 50 to $100 to $200 phones. They're either manufactured by a Xiaomi or a Samsung or an Indian company like Reliance Geo. And they're very cheap and they're quite efficient and that's how Indians are getting online. Now Lindsay mentioned that one way of comparing this or one way of analyzing the scale of the change is by comparing it to what America went through in the 20th century with the car. So let's play that analogy out a little bit more. You invent the car and with the car you then invent or not invent but you build roads and highways and the interstate system and then you create tens of thousands of jobs and then with that you create suburbia and the picket fence home and then with all of that you create the commute to work and then when you have the commute to work you then need to create an infrastructure along the way so you have gas stations and shopping malls and the multiplex and the factory outlet and all of these things that then begin to flourish and proliferate around America. Now you have all of that and then there are cultural changes as well. I mean with that comes the notion of the car being enshrined as this American product in Hollywood. You have the race and the chase. You have the notion of the car as being freedom. The car is a young American's first private property. It is where a young American is most likely or was most likely to have his or her first kiss. The car was freedom. The car was the American dream. It was the embodiment of mobility. You take all of those things in the 20th century and transpose it to India and one can make a case that the smartphone could be something similar for India. It could be the tool of social mobility. It could be the embodiment of the Indian dream for a new generation of young Indians. Remember India is very young, median age of about 27. India is as I said quite poor but that doesn't mean that these poor young Indians don't have giant king-sized aspirations. And this tool which again as I said is their first camera, is their first internet device, their first video device, their first window to the world could be something that enables them and allows them to dream bigger. And that's how really the story of this book began for me. When I moved to India in 2014 with CNN, I was struck by just how much propaganda there was about the phone. Every single advertisement, every single billboard, every sponsorship for a Bollywood movie for the Indian cricket team, all of them were either cell phone companies, smartphone companies or internet companies. And in these advertisements, they all were selling this notion of an Indian dream, of this one device that would make life easier, this one device that would paper over the cracks and inequalities that we know to exist in India, this one device that would be a vehicle for people's dreams. You know, India is not only a poor country, it's very divided, it's unequal. It's divided along the lines of cost of rich and poor but also urban rule and which community you belong to and which religion you are, male and female. The internet in India is deeply male. 70% of Indians, 70% of India's internet population is male. Only 30% is female. In villages, it's even worse. Only 10% of India's rural internet population is female. And the phone change, all of those things. Well, at least that is what the advertisers and the companies that are paying all of this money for the billboards and ads that you see in India, that is what their promise is, that this one device can transform India. And that's really how the journey of this book began for me. A lot of the book, and I hope you get to read it, is good stuff. It looks at, I have a chapter in women where I look at how the smartphone could be the tool that makes, allows women to have more equal lives in India. I look at how education will be transformed by the phone in several ways. One could be the simple fact that 300 million illiterate people now have a means and a way to speak to their phone. The first character in my book is a literate. She speaks to her phone and she says in Hindi, Mojit Taj Mahal Likal, which means show me the Taj Mahal. And a video pops up on the screen and she sees the Taj Mahal for the first time in moving imagery. It's a very powerful moment. But for me, it was unimaginable that something like that could happen five or 10 years ago in a country as unequal as India is. There's that, then there's the transformation in the gig economy. If you look at the work profile of the average Indian worker, they are very well suited to blue collar work. And blue collar work is exactly what the gig economy will create. If you look at delivery jobs, warehousing jobs, hacking jobs, Uber has created half a million jobs, Ola, its Indian competitor has created one million driver jobs. So there's a lot of stuff on the plus side of the ledger. There's a lot of stuff on the minus side of the ledger as well. And that ranges from an explosion in pornography. Most Indians, especially in villages, would never have had access to adult video content. And now suddenly it's right there on their phones. And this has a range of impacts that I begin to explain in the book. Fake news has become a real scourge in India. And that has led to really deadly incidents, lynchings in certain parts of the country. There's also the question of government overreach. Will a connected India become something that the government would try and take advantage of? And these are all questions that I began to explore in the book. And I'll leave you with one thought because one of the things, one of the premises that I began with is that tech would change India. And while that is true, it is also true that India will change tech. And this is true in many different ways, but I'll give you a couple of examples. India is what I like to call a very low trust society. And the reason why I say that is that, Frank Fukuyama had this great book called Trust where he divided the world up into high trust and low trust societies. The Germany and Japan are very high trust. Things work giant conglomerates. People believe in the system, low trust societies at places like Sicily or Taiwan where businesses are mostly family run, they're small, they're tribal. He doesn't classify India, but I imagine India to be a very low trust society. The reason why I say that is, for example, Indians never show up for meetings on time. Even we started five minutes late. The reason again is that Indians believe it's in their economic incentive to show up late. So an Indian will show up late for a meeting in New Delhi because he knows that the person he's meeting is gonna show up late. The same Indian in New York is likely gonna show up on time because he'll be penalized for not showing up on time. But the best example of this low trust and the reason why the smartphone may not necessarily have all the impacts you might think it would have is look at Ola. So think about Uber before I come to Ola. But Uber here, as you all know, it sort of negates the need for you to carry cash. You can get into a taxi, you don't need to transact cash. And it's a fairly high trust system where you have a mobile transaction that just works, you don't need to talk about it. In India, when Uber took off, its Indian competitor, Ola, decided to offer cash transactions. So you book the car on your phone, you get in the car, but at the end of the ride, you still pay in cash. More than 70 to 80% of Ola's transactions were in cash. And then Uber followed suit. Why? Because it turned out that Indians didn't trust credit cards. They didn't trust digital payments. And so that's another example of how even though tech promises so much in India, India will find its own unique way to muddle through these changes and find its own indigenous ways of dealing with the tsunami of change that smartphones and technology will bring to the country. So I'm gonna stop there and just end with the thought that this moment that we're in of so many hundreds of millions of Indians discovering the internet on smartphones really is incredibly transformative for India. It is a moment that we began off as thinking as inherently good, but it comes with a lot of bad as well. And like all change, it's going to be disruptive. But what we know for sure is that it's really going to shape and be a capitalist for all the things, all the churn that was already taking place in India. So thank you very much. Thank you for letting me speak. And I'm gonna invite Milan Vaishnav on stage now so we can have some Q and A. Please bring your chair up a little bit. Thanks everyone. Thanks Ravi. I think I know most people in this room. My name is Milan Vaishnav. Here at the Carnegie Endowment. I had the pleasure of talking to Ravi when he was first thinking about this book and then reading the book when it was still a draft and now finally holding the final copy of my hand. So congratulations to you Ravi on this. You've sketched out I think for the audience here some of the broad themes. And so I wanna probe a little bit deeper and then open it up to everyone for questions. I wanna start with women because that's where you start the book. And you just relay the anecdote about going to a village I believe in Rajasthan where you see this woman encounter the Taj Mahal on her smartphone. Now we're in an interesting place in India with women in society today because on the one hand we've seen an enormous social and political empowerment in many ways. Women are turning out to vote in greater numbers. We're seeing the rise, the Me Too movement for those who've been following the news. But economically we're seeing women drop out of the labor force at a pretty alarming clip. So the female labor force participation rate in India is around 25 or 26% is one of the lowest in the world and it's actually going down. So I wanna ask you about the role of technology and could technology be a way that you could argue that it's been a powerful tool of upliftment in terms of social and political mobilization? But could it also be used towards economic ends when it comes to women particularly? That's a great question and I think it can but there are obstacles. And the obstacle for that answer is the same as the obstacle for whether women can get online in the first place. And what is that obstacle? The obstacle is men. For all the great stories I saw of women getting online through smartphones of discovering the internet of realizing that this is a tool that they could use to work or look at videos that would help them in their stitching businesses or help them educate their children or help them educate themselves as well. For all of those stories, there were other stories of husbands, father-in-laws, fathers who were reluctant to let their children or the women in the family get phones. There were villages, entire villages that would ban the smartphone for girls under the age of 18. And I report from one of those villages in the book. And to a point, the men I spoke to there saw this device as an immense threat. They saw it as something that if women would start using, a sort of dam would break. Like it would change everything that they knew about society. It would basically weaken their role. It would weaken their hold over women in that social circumstance. So I think if you see men as this big hurdle to getting women online, I think men are also a hurdle and society as a whole is the hurdle to getting women to work more in India. Because if you look at a lot of the cases of women who tend to find jobs and then mysteriously they drop off the workforce a few years into it, or if their husbands get richer, they tend to drop off again. And part of that is because of the family pressure of, you know, it doesn't seem right for me to be working or what would people say. It's sort of a status thing. Yeah, it's a status thing. It's seen as, why should I be working? And I guess this feeling is in both women but also in the family and in a weird sense that there's a feedback loop there that doesn't help women at all. So I see that as being the greatest hurdle but I do think within all of this, if you look at the span of where India's headed, India's headed towards change. It is headed towards modernity. It is headed towards certainly women having more rights in the future than they did in the past. And I see the phone as not necessarily an on-off change button but as something that will be a catalyst in accelerating some of this change. Because if you look at young women, young girls who are able to discover the internet very quickly on a smartphone, who are able to access the world through this phone, if they don't have a TV at home or if they don't have the internet through a PC at home, but they're then able to compare with their global peers through this phone, through chatting apps, through videos. They're able to watch stuff from around the world. I think that will percolate and have a powerful impact in ways that we haven't fully begun to realize. So I'm more optimistic maybe than I should be but I think it will help. So we've just had our midterm elections here in this country last night. And I think we're probably all kind of recovering from late nights in front of the television. But India's elections as most people in this room know are coming up in the spring, most likely of next year. And we're seeing a lot of stories come out in the global press as well as in the Indian press about how the internet and the smartphone are actually can be quite damaging to electoral democracy in ways that are not too unfamiliar here in the United States. So things like fake news, misinformation, but with the smartphone and the ubiquity of WhatsApp on everybody's phones, which is a highly decentralized form of communication, introduces a new kind of wrinkle. So I guess my question to you is, A, how worried are you about the role the smartphone is playing on the negative side of the ledger and is India prepared really to deal with the kind of world's biggest and greatest elections on the one hand and this burgeoning population of smartphone users? I'm very worried, very, very worried. There are 250 million WhatsApp users in India. And to give you a sense of how tough it must be for them to figure out whether to trust something that they're receiving on their phones, I'll give you an example. So again, all of you discovered the internet in the late 90s, only 2000s. And you must remember chain mails when you were using hotmail for the first time. And these chain mails would hit your inbox and they would say stuff like, if you don't forward this to 10 people or 15 people, you'll be unlucky in love or, you're cursed for the rest of your life, stuff like that. And what do you do? The first couple of times you're like, who shucks, I better forward this to 10 people, right? And then one of the people you forward it to says, hey, this is stupid. You don't need to follow this stuff. It's a chain mail. And then you stop doing that. You learn from your mistakes. You're sensitized to what is a silly practice. So no more chain mail for any of you guys. But in India, put yourself in the shoes of someone who didn't go through that evolution, didn't go through that process, didn't know what chain mail was and has just discovered the internet on a smartphone and has just started using WhatsApp. And not only that, but if you know how WhatsApp works, it works from it's peer to peer. The people who can send you stuff have your mobile number. And intrinsically, you tend to trust someone whose number you have or who you've given a number to. So now you're receiving a message from someone. The message could be a video of some mob violence or alleged mob violence, Hindu Muslim mob violence. And you look at the video and well, it seems it's from this guy I trust or my cousin. And you're like, oh gosh, this is terrible. And so you hit forward and send it to other people who send it to other people and then it just multiplies exponentially. But no one stops to check. Well, this video was actually from five years ago or actually it wasn't even an Indian video. It's from Guatemala and they're not Hindus or Muslims and there's no reason to get worked up and we shouldn't go start a ride. But there's no stop button. There's no check button on any of this stuff. And so I'm deeply worried. I think India is very susceptible to the misuse of powerful tools like WhatsApp. I think India has always had a problem with superstition with people being gullible to old wives' tales and to rumors. And this sort of amplifies it and magnifies it and turns it into an exponential problem. And I don't think WhatsApp has figured out how to deal with this really. They've reduced the number of people you can forward a message to. I don't think India has figured out how to deal with this. I'm immensely worried about what this can do for democracy. I'm immensely worried about it being misused by political parties, by bad actors to start a riot, to spread rumors, to spread fear. It deeply worries me. And I think the only way to deal with it, and before this a couple of months ago I was in India doing the rounds for the India launch of my book and many people asked me this question. And the only answer I have as to what we should do is to say that India needs to invest heavily in digital literacy and media literacy. And this is not as crazy a thought as you may imagine. I mean, the state in India and elsewhere has always invested in these kinds of things from safe sex education to don't drink and drive, to wear your seatbelt when you drive. These are standard campaigns for any state to run and to educate people about how to use a new tool or a new device. And really, the state should be doing that for smartphones because on the one hand, if you're gonna sell the propaganda that this is transformative, that this is gonna help you, which it will, you also need to warn people. You also need to find ways to include literature with every device or include teaching and lessons with every device that this is how you could be fooled. This is how you could be gullible. This is what you need to learn. These are the things you need to know about how technology can be misused. I don't see that conversation taking place. So, you know, the government's, or Facebook, which owns what's up is announced that they're gonna put limits on a number of forwards, right, so that that will help to contain the virality of certain posts. In your mind, that's sort of inadequate because you're not dealing with the fundamental problem. Yeah, I think it is inadequate. I mean, let's say instead of 200 people, I can forward to 20 people. But if those 20 people forward to 20 people, that's 400, and then they forward to 20 people, that's getting tough for me now. But it's sort of, you can see how quickly this can spread, right, so 20, thinking of 20 as a number is quite small, but if you think of it in exponential terms, then it's immense. And I don't think that stops the problem. So, speaking of political parties, I think tomorrow, if I'm not mistaken, is the two-year anniversary of demonetization. So there were, you know, two momentous things which happened on November 8th, 2016, and one of them was Donald Trump's election. The second was Narendra Modi's announcement that he was, you know, at the stroke of midnight going to invalidate 86% of India's currency in an effort to kind of crack down on black money and corruption. And so 500,000 rupee notes were gonna be invalidated and people would either have to turn that money in in exchange of new notes or they were gonna be caught out with a bunch of useless currency. Now, this was a hugely controversial policy. One of the justifications, which was ex-post kind of used to legitimize this, because obviously it created a lot of disruption and sort of frenetic, you know, what do we do, what do we do, was that this would compel people to use mobile money, to use digital payments to get out of cash, to do things that had a traceability, that had a digital paper trail, that would curb the extent to which there was illicit money, kind of a wash in the Indian economy. So now that we're two years out, where are we on kind of, you know, people transacting digitally and was demonetization sort of worth it, you know, two years later? What's your assessment? I mean, demonetization was definitely not worth it. Every economist worth his or her salt has weighed in on this and there's enough data to show that, you know, it's like taking a sledgehammer to, you know, try and, you know, fix a tiny nail somewhere and then you take the whole wall out and that that's essentially what demonetization was. And there's immense sort of consensus on this. So I'm not gonna try and be a contrarian there. What you said about it being touted, exposed as a good thing for the rise of the digital economy in India is true. It was exposed. And the thing to say there is that it was beneficial and that immediately after demonetization, there was a spurt in digital transactions and then there was also a decline afterwards once physical currency re-entered the market, which is not to say that the decline was permanent and then once it sort of stabilized, digital transactions have continued to rise in India pretty much as planned and as was expected, if this event, the seismic event had never happened. But two years on, where are we? Some things are clear. More Indians are indeed transacting online. The size of the e-commerce market, which again is a digital economy market, has grown, continues to grow, projections are that it will grow even more. What is also clear is that formalization of the workforce has continued to grow pace. So just to explain what that means, India has a large informal market as it's euphemistically known, which is basically the market for which there is no paper record. These are people who are working in odd jobs, low level labor jobs where they do not, there's no paper trail of the money that they're being paid and they don't put it in bank accounts, they're not paying income taxes, so on and so forth. There's been an increase or an acceleration in the formalization of the Indian economy. Some of that you could say you could attribute it to perhaps an increase in digital transactions or maybe an increase in say Uber and Ola drivers who are now instead of transacting only in cash, they are receiving cash or money directly into their bank accounts and so the government's able to track how much they're making a little better than they were before. So they're improvements and I guess one thing there's no doubt that if you look at the trajectory of where the Indian economy is going, it sort of missed the credit card boom and I think it's gonna skip that credit card boom. Indians never really ended up trusting credit cards in a mass way. Signs are that they're beginning to trust the digital economy that they're beginning to trust being able to transact on whether it's WhatsApp or Paytm, which is the Indian equivalent of PayPal or Venmo and other companies like that. The government itself has its own platform to transact money as well. So the trend lines are all up and I see no reason why years from now we'll see a widening of the pie, we'll see a growth in the digital economy but again, none of the credit should go to demonetization. It would have happened anyway. It was happening anyway and so that was just a blip, it was a shock but it didn't have any long-term impacts I think. Great, I know that some of you in this room have questions so why don't we open it up? There's gonna be someone with a microphone going around if you could just keep your question short so we can take as many as possible and just identify who you are and we'll take a couple of questions for Ravi. So gentlemen in the back there and then we'll come to the front here. Just here, yeah. Thank you very much, this is very interesting. My name is Lex Riefel, I'm with Brookings Institution. You mentioned the gig economy is one of the chapters you did and very interested in including the smartphone in the context of unemployment, employment and you have this huge challenge of creating employment opportunities and a lot of things that have to be done and I'm interested in your thoughts on how far, to what extent this can help with that, will help or what else needs to be done? So I think the answer on this is mixed and I cover a lot of this in that chapter as well but so on the plus side of the ledger it's quite clear that there are jobs being created by the likes of Uber and Ola which I mentioned earlier or Uber's Indian competitor. Ola for example has created more than a million driver jobs Uber has created more than half a million driver jobs. These obviously have replaced some other jobs that existed before but it's fair to say that net net there's been a fair bit of job creation on that side of things that are explicitly linked to the smartphone and the ability to make you know driving a taxi much more efficient and connecting people and all of that. Also on the plus side of the ledger there's the fact that with the rise of the digital economy which is as we know smartphone driven in India there's going to be a rise in transactions and therefore there are studies that show there will be a real spurt in servicing the digital economy so jobs that are delivery jobs jobs that are warehousing and packing jobs so much so that HSBC has forecast that those kinds of jobs could end up you know creating several millions of jobs in the next 10 to 20 years. They may have since revised that estimate I think. But on the minus side of the ledger there's a lot too there's the fact that brick and mortar shops may be destroyed there's the fact that there could be automation, mechanization, things that would then hurt the job market in different ways. So you know I think the prognosis is mixed just as it probably is here. One key difference between India and the West is that the job profile of the average Indian job seeker you know 1.2 million Indians enter the workforce every month something like that. You know for many of those Indians gig economy type jobs are actually a good skills match so delivery or packing stuff. The question is whether it can sustain that and I think the jury is out there so this is by no means a fix all. India still needs to think long and hard about creating jobs for young people. We have a question up here on the front. Ken Dylan, Sancia Press speaking of young people. What's the generational impact of both the internet and the smart phones are the young people thinking boy we know more than the older people let's ignore them all this kind of. Creating teenage rebellion in India. Yeah I guess there must be a look when I was working in India I was running an office so I did end up hiring and interviewing a lot of young people and they certainly had no regard for me so maybe there's some smartphone connection there but I mean jokes aside I think look put yourself in their shoes and these are young Indians who, not like me I grew up upper middle class in Calcutta and I was very lucky but for most Indians hundreds of millions of Indians who are mostly rural or quite poor in relative terms this device is life changing it is something that was unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago someone who was the son of someone who was making $1,000 a year would never have dreamed of one day getting a phone or one day owning computing power in their pocket or being able to connect with the world on the internet those were unimaginable things and so to have that happen now with very cheap smartphones or hand-me-downs or free data as the case may be I do think it emboldens, it empowers and in some way it must be shaping the creation, the building of an Indian dream this notion that we can do more we can achieve more we can try for things that may have not been something we could have dreamed of 10 or 15 years ago if my father's a carpenter and my grandfather was a carpenter maybe I don't need to be a carpenter maybe this YouTube video that I'm watching could inspire me to do something else so there's a little bit of that and the optimist in me thinks that's a good thing and is empowering a lot of people there's a whole bad side to that as well which we can get into but I do think it's a change agent ready to question here in the front, Jane? Hi, I'm Caroline with the Truman National Security Project so you paint a really compelling picture of progress and modernity in India and it's very real the first time I went you meet young Indians and they know American slang and music videos and movies and they all watch Friends and there's all these references and you think they're just like me and then you realize that maybe this is kind of a false sense of progress or a false sense of modernity where schools are still really bad and education pollution there's so many problems that the government still isn't tackling and they're kind of throwing all this modernity and technology on it with ad-har and demonetization and all these things and you think it's progress but then all these things are left behind so what's the danger of having this kind of false sense of modernity amongst these young people what are the dangers of that? Yeah, that's a great question and you're absolutely right I think I'm guessing that the Indians you met were mostly urban if they'd been watching Friends but most rural Indians would never have heard of Friends and Friends will not happen in their lives under normal circumstances but with a smartphone maybe they could Google and maybe they could YouTube and so that is an equalizing force for them and I should make clear my book is mostly about poorer and rural Indians and I was less interested in urban richer Indians because I've always felt that the rich in any city, anywhere in the world Delhi, Bombay, Mexico City, London, Tokyo their lives are kind of the same they do the same stuff they watch the same things they eat the same kind of food so I explicitly ignored that class of people but even if we were to take the rural Indian that I had in mind in this book and the characters who are in this book I think there's a real danger to thinking of technology as a fix-all and to infusing too much hope and too much optimism into a tech boom because ultimately what it is is just a catalyst it's not going to fix as you say education and I have a chapter in education where I look at that where the phone just simply handing a young child a phone doesn't turn that child into an educated adult I mean you still need good teachers you still need good software you still need the ability to impart an education and that's a deeply personal process you still need parents who can enable that child to do the right thing with that phone so there's a whole ecosystem that you need for the good stuff that the phone brings to flourish and that's where I think everything that you look of where India's headed the phone will catalyze some of those changes it'll speed some of those changes up but it's no fix-all I mean you look at the content market in India for example so Netflix is so bullish about finding new subscribers in India but while more Indians may be able to access Netflix that doesn't mean more Indians can pay for it you know so you still need the size of the pie to expand you still need the middle class to grow you still need people to make more money and for all of India's ills you still need attitudes to change you still need society to change that stuff will take time it'll be generational maybe even longer than that so why don't we take a couple of questions at once and then let you answer so we'll start with the woman in the back and then Vijay and then did you have a question here in the front so we'll take these three so start with you and then Vijay and then you in the front and then we'll let Ruby respond please hi thanks I'm Amy Coppolo and I work down at HHS I was just curious you're talking about the rural poor population I'm wondering what the positive or negative foreseeing consequences on health are going to be with regards to the smartphone revolution great and then let's take Vijay here on the aisle my name is Kumar and I'm unaffiliated with any organization but I did have a question on digitization I understand that Kenya for example is digitized that they have comparable for capital income to India but I don't have any hard figures but I understand that political corruption in Kenya is just as much as it is in India right and then let's take one question here in the front thank you I apologize for not yet having read the book my name is Beverly Boyce my wife and I have done some work in India on behalf of the National Endowment for Humanities before we were doing that about a dozen years ago we're in a small village in the Sundarbans down from Kolkata and cell phones not yet smartphones but cell phones were beginning to I didn't have one yet but there were several people in the village who did with the smartphone you began to address this but it's impact on education and on mobility the constructive and maybe more disruptive aspects of it I'm interested in you say in other words if a smartphone if smartphones in a village would aid in education of youth or adults in technical education especially maybe is that likely to be more constructive or more disruptive insofar as maybe emptying out the villages and the rural economy and simply bringing more people to the cities right so we've got a diversity of questions there health corruption and disruptive potential that's excellent so I'll answer them in reverse order so I think to your point of people leaving villages and moving to the cities that's happening anyway and I don't think that trend is going to change and so along comes a smartphone and as I was saying I mean I think it will accelerate that movement I think it will be a way for people in villages to aspire to a different life somewhere else it will help them in the same way as I guess the car did in America and boost urbanization here 50 years ago there's a lot that is constructive with the phone and education ranging from I write about this app called Hello English and basically it's an app that's very popular in India it's often rated number one on the Google platform and users all they need to know is the alphabet the English alphabet and they need to speak some other Indian language and it's remarkable you can play these games and you can sit in a you could be in a traffic jam on a bus you could be in a queue somewhere and you can still keep playing these games on your phone and gradually improve your grammar and your English and sentences that you can use and that's just one example of many of things that software is an app that we're again unimaginable that these things would be something that people in villages in India could access unimaginable they're never going to afford was that a stone on a computer so the fact that this is literally in their hands is very powerful and there's a lot that could go wrong with that as well I think that it could be misused in any number of ways but I think it's not for us to judge I think ultimately this is a tool and this is a tool that they can use however they want and the fact that there's so much potential to it is a good thing in that on healthcare you know as with any book there are issues that you pick and there are issues that you wish you picked and did more on and health is one of the things that I did not really look into in much detail than I wish I did I think the phone will have the smartphone will have a big impact on healthcare there are many companies that are innovating in India right now on being able to just with small attachments from blood tests to malaria tests to there's a new system that helps the blind be able to read and write not through Braille but through smartphones so there's a lot of stuff that is very promising and enough to make one very optimistic on the healthcare side and again as with all things on the minus side of the ledger there's a growing body of evidence here in the United States that you know for teenagers for example excessive smartphone use can lead to depression increased rates of suicide you know teenagers here they don't feel the need to leave home anymore because why should they when they don't need to go to the mall to meet friends they can you know chat with them in their pajamas sitting at home and that's going to happen in India as well and there will be an epidemic of mental health problems and depression and maybe even suicide and so as with so many of the things we've been talking about today there's a real plus and minus and on the minus side of the ledger I think it's up to the state to really try and mitigate those things and lead public awareness campaigns and then the second question which would be the last one was about corruption I mean I don't think the phone should be held up as a totem of being a fix all for corruption I think where it helps is that it allows voters to fact check more it allows them to be more informed at the very least if they know how to use their phones well then if they don't well then they will fall prey to fake news so I think a better indicator for corrupt economies sort of moving up that chain is other things not really technology but more likely civil society, a free press you know growing income levels growing development levels better rates of literacy those would be better indicators of whether a state is less or more corrupt or where it's heading on the curve Great, Robbie thank you very much I want to bring this part of the evening to a close but I want to invite all of you who are here to just join us in the room right behind here we have some refreshments and most importantly copies of Robbie's book that are on sale and that he has graciously agreed to sign I want to thank our friends at Asian Society Policy Institute for hosting this and all of you for coming so please let's adjourn to the next room pick up a drink pick up some food Robbie will be on hand to sign books and answer questions and please join me in thanking Robbie Thank you so much