In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four. In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere. The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.

POWER. REFORM. SCAMS. The 2G spectrum allocation scam struck a blow to the UPA-II government, and was perhaps India's biggest political scandal. The notional loss to the exchequer was a whopping Rs 1.76 trillion. Yet, it was no aberration. The 2G story is rooted in the very fabric of economic reforms in India--reforms that are essential for the growing economy. When Pradip Baijal took over as the third chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India in 2003, the telecom sector was in serious crisis. But there was also resistance to the reforms he sought to implement. They were seen as both anti-establishment and pro-private business. Baijal fought for the reforms at great personal cost and, years later, the accused in the 2G scam blamed him for creating conditions conducive to malpractices. A Bureaucrat Fights Back: The Complete Story of Indian Reforms uses the 2G story--Indian telecom's rise from 3.1 million mobile users in 2000 to a billion in 2015--to analyse the roadblocks to change in India. It also captures the dilemma of India's civil servants, an especially pressing concern given the necessity of reforms. You are not doing your job if you shy away from reforms, and if you pursue them, you are likely to get mired in inquiries. How does a bureaucrat walk that tightrope? And at what cost? Intensely personal and deeply political, A Bureaucrat Fights Back is an examination of the best and worst of India's economic coming of age.

In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four. In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere. The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.

The novels in India is conventionally thought to have emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. The year of the Rebellion, 1857, also saw the publication of Alaler Gharer Dulal, upon which Bankimchandra Chatterji, who himself holds a lofty place in the development of the novel In India, lavished praise as a beautifully written work.

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