The ubiquitousness of the mobile phone in urban areas and its spread in rural areas in India seem to have fed a notion — not substantiated by hard evidence — that there is a wide and deep market for such services in the countryside. Such a notion has remained largely unverified because of the scarcity of data on the extent of ownership of assets and access to services such as radio, television, cable or dish TV connection, mobile phone and other consumer durables.
In particular, there is no way of knowing how the demand for such goods is distributed across different segments of rural consumers. Not only would such data show how the demand for such goods and services is skewed across social groups, but they would also show the depth of demand. Unfortunately, neither National Sample Survey data, nor other data on the extent of ownership of such assets gathered by agencies such as the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), enable one to examine the extent of skewness in the ownership of or access to these assets and services.
New data from a series of village surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS), as part of a continuing Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) begun in 2005, provide some insight into the nature of demand for these goods and services in rural areas. The data are only a part of the data gathered from the six rounds of surveys conducted since 2005 on various aspects of rural life.
The data show the relative importance of different kinds of assets for rural folk. More significantly, the data on ownership of these assets across social groups clearly establish the stratified nature of the demand for these goods in rural markets. In short, the data show the utter futility of making statements about an aggregative notion of “rural demand” without taking into account the differences across social groups.
Results from village surveys
Between 2005 and 2009, the FAS conducted surveys in 14 villages in six States — three in Andhra Pradesh (2005), two each in Uttar Pradesh (2006), Maharashtra (2007), Rajasthan (2007) and Madhya Pradesh (2008), and three in Karnataka (2009). The villages were drawn from different agro-ecological zones within each of the six States. Two of the surveyed villages — Badhar (Anuppur district, Madhya Pradesh) and Dungariya (Udaipur district, Rajasthan) — were entirely tribal. The surveys, which covered 3,139 households in the first four years, gathered information on a wide range of variables, of which we have examined nine — access to electricity, ownership of five consumer durables (radio, tape recorder, television, DVD or CD player and computer) and access to telephone services (mobile and landline connections).
Television ownership dominates
The data reveal that the incidence of ownership of TV dominates other durables and services. The incidence of households owning a television is about 50 per cent in most villages. TV ownership was obviously low in villages where access to the electricity was low. In Mahatwar, a predominately Dalit village in Ballia district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, only half the households had access to electricity, and only 19 per cent owned a TV. In Harevli in Western Uttar Pradesh, where only about one-third of the households had an electricity connection, it was only 43 per cent. Not surprisingly, the access to a cable TV connection is closely correlated to TV ownership in the surveyed villages.
The incidence of the ownership of radio and two-in-one and cassette recorders is generally lower than that of TV, suggesting that the TV is the primary mode of entertainment and access to information. The incidence of ownership of DVD and CD players generally corresponded to ownership of radio and devices playing recorded music, although there were some exceptions. Only three households – of the more than 3,000 surveyed over the years – possessed a computer. All three were in one village — Ananthavaram — in south costal Andhra Pradesh.
The data from two villages — Dungariya in Rajasthan and Badhar in Madhya Pradesh — where almost all the residents are Scheduled Tribes, provide a sharp contrast to all the other villages surveyed. The fact that not a single household in either village had an electricity connection appeared to disqualify them from accessing any service or owning any of the assets. Only 12 per cent of the residents of Dungariya, and 14 per cent in Badhar, owned a radio. Not a single household in Badhar owned a tape recorder or a TV, or had a cable TV connection. In effect, a battery-run radio was the only modern source of entertainment and information.
Access to telephone services
Despite the rapid growth of mobile telephony in recent years, rural tele-density (defined as the number of persons per hundred owning a telephone connection) in India continues to lag far behind urban rates. The latest figures released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) show that tele-density in rural India was 24.29 in March 2010, compared to 119.73 for urban areas. An important caveat is that the surveys in Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were conducted in 2005 and in 2006, prior to the relatively sharp increase in rural mobile phone penetration rate.
Rural tele-density increased from 1.86 per cent in March 2006 to 5.78 per cent in March 2007, the first year in which there was a spurt in rural tele-density. Given the rapid increase in tele-density in recent years, it seems logical to provide for a downward bias in the tele-density rates for the villages in Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
A striking result from the surveys is that in most villages the tele-density rates in the survey years were higher than the prevailing national rates for rural India.
In the all-tribal villages of Badhar and Dungariya, only one out of 218 households had a mobile phone.
Ownership and access
The most striking results of the survey pertain to the extent of inequality in ownership of assets and access to services. The overall incidence of TV ownership among Other Caste households in the 14 villages surveyed was 62 per cent. But only about one-third of Dalit households, out of more than 900 households, owned one.
The incidence of TV ownership in most villages, which appears to be high at first glance, reveals a completely different picture. For instance, in the two Karnataka villages of Alabaujanahalli (in Mandya distict) and Siresandra (in Kolar district), where the incidence of TV ownership was generally high, the overall incidence of TV ownership was 57 per cent and 63 per cent, respectively. However, only one-fourth of Dalit households in Alabujahanalli, and a little over one-third of the households in Siresandra, had TVs.
Significantly, the gap between Dalit households and Other Castes in the ownership of radio is much narrower. Sixteen per cent of the 1,700 Other Caste households surveyed owned a radio, but 12 per cent of the 900 Dalit households surveyed also owned a radio.
The incidence of ownership of telephones is also heavily skewed against Dalit and Scheduled Tribe households. In Ananthavaram village in Andhra Pradesh, which was the first village to be surveyed by the FAS, in 2005, while tele-density among Other Caste households was 10 per cent, tele-density among Dalit households was only two per cent; it was nil in the case of ST households. In 2009, by which time rural tele-density in India had increased to six per cent, the FAS found that in Alabujanahalli in Karnataka, it was 22 per cent. However, while the tele-density among Other Castes was 31 per cent, it was only eight per cent among the Dalits.
Inequality and land
Inequality in the ownership and access to basic goods and services tends to mirror the inequality in the distribution of income-generating assets, particularly land.
For example, in 25F Gulabewala (Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan), Harevli (Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh), Gharsondi (Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh) and Alabujanahalli (Mandya, Karnataka), where commercial agriculture has gathered pace and agriculture is relatively advanced, but where land ownership remains highly unequal, the inequalities in access to services and ownership of assets are also very high. Only 12 per cent of Dalit households in 25F Gulabewala, and seven per cent of the Dalit households in Harevli, owned a TV, while 86 per cent and 72 per cent, respectively, of Other Caste households did so. As a contrast, in villages where land distribution was comparatively more equitable, and where Dalit households owned some land, inequalities were also lower.
The results of the surveys thus show the extremely skewed nature of the ownership of assets across social groups. They are a clear indication that general economic “prosperity” is not good enough to even out extreme inequalities. They also provide a sober antidote to the euphoria that prevails in the media about the extent of access to basic goods and services in rural India.
( Shamsher Singh is a Senior Research Fellow at the Sociological Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata .)
