icegov2012 proceedings

Laggards or Victims of Socioeconomic Conditions?
Findings from Ongoing Survey of Female Slum-dwellers
Without Cell Phone Ownership
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the following details from an ongoing survey
of 334 poor female slum-dwellers who don’t own cell phones:
demographic features including socioeconomic status, sources of
income, barriers to adopt cell phones, and perceived incentives for
and consequences of using cell phones in India. The findings
differ from three key characteristics of laggards identified by the
diffusion of innovation literature. The findings based on responses
from 334 poor laggards suggest hypotheses for predicting the cell
phone adoption by the remaining poor laggards in India.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.1 [Systems and Information Theory]: Value of Information
H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human Factors
General Terms
Economics and Human Factors
Keywords
Diffusion of Innovation, Laggards, Poor Slum-Dwellers,
Adoption of Cell Phones
1. INTRODUCTION
Cell phones are the most widely adopted information and
communication technology (ICT) innovation in the world with
more than five billion subscribers as of December 2010, and the
customer-base was expected to exceed six billion by the end of
2011[1]. Since 2000, coverage of mobile telephony has expanded,
and cell phone subscriptions in developing countries like India
and China have increased by over 500%. Intense competition and
innovation within the telecommunications sector in the last decade
has catapulted India into the largest and fastest-growing cell
phone market in the world. Inexpensive cell phone handsets ($15
Devendra Potnis and Kanchan Deosthali
University of Tennessee
01-865-974-2148, 01-518-322-6693
dpotnis@utk.edu, kdeostha@utk.edu
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per piece and above), fierce competition in the Indian cell phone
industry (five out of 15 service providers sharing the market
almost equally), and very cheap tariff rates (less than two cents
per minute) have made cell phones affordable even to poor.
Further, collective ownership models (sharing cell phones through
SIM cards and payments for air-time) and flexible payment
options such as micro-payments (up to a dollar) make cell phones
an attractive communication medium [3].
In India, thirty percent of the nation’s 1.3 billion people are under
18[5], which is the legal age for buying cell phones in the country.
Out of 910 million potential cell phone owners, 907 million had
adopted the ICT innovation as of September 2011 [4]. Thus,
according to the diffusion of innovation literature, the citizens
above 18 who do not own cell phones can be labeled as
innovation laggards. The diffusion of innovation theory [2]
proposes five categories for innovation adopters: innovators, early
adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards (see Figure
1).
Figure 1. Adopter Categories [2]
Adopter categories are the classifications of members of a social
system on the basis of innovativeness, or the degree to which an
individual or other unit of adoption accepts new ideas when
compared to other members of a system.
1.1 Research Objective
Despite the cheapest cell phone prices in the world and a host of
affordable services and products offered over the cell phones,
more than 3 million Indian adults – categorized as innovation
laggards – do not own and/or use cell phones. To learn more
about these innovation laggards, this study focused on poor
female slum-dwellers who don’t own cell phones. These female
slum-dwellers earn less than two dollars a day and represent one
of the most disadvantaged populations in the male-dominant
Indian society. The following research questions were explored as
part of this ongoing study: