Teleuse@BOP3: A Qualitative Study - LIRNEasia

male initiators, however, purchase the SIMs taking money from the user who needs the SIM. In Pakistan, Abed
Ansar’s 3 sons in Jatoi, practically modulate his entire phone use. His eldest son sent him his own second handset
with a Telenor SIM since that is what he primarily uses. The two younger sons have subsequently got his assent to
purchase two additional SIMs of Mobilink Jazz and Ufone, indicating that their elder brother also use these SIMs at
different points of the day. Both these sons now also use these two additional SIMs for communicating with their own
friends and often keep them on themselves than with their father. The father does not particularly mind this since he
believes that the sons understand such things better than him.
Managing contacts of parents is a fundamental way in which youngsters in all these countries are assisting their
parents. About 80% of the parent groups in our entire sample are non-English literate while the remaining 20% can
manage with difficulty. Very few, mostly in Philippines and some in Sri Lanka, managed to understand and
communicate in English with adequate ease. This is substantially because all the countries except Philippines use
non Roman scripts. As a result, parents are inevitably turning to their children, for both linguistic and technology
assistance.
The assistance with managing contacts comes most often in the form of inserting new contacts. In recurrent
incidents, we saw the contact’s name being written as ‘Uncle / Aunt (in national language) XYZ.’ On being probed,
the main respondents clarified that these are not their uncles and aunts but rather their brothers and sisters. The
younger children insert these names in English but they do so often with several errors in spellings. The numbers,
however, are correct. The older respondents indicate that this is a useful practice since they can monitor the number
insertion in the phone and their children also get better in using the device, which they can then teach them as well.
The youth as well as the children are also instrumental in reloading. This is specifically visible in Pakistan and
Bangladesh with female respondents. The younger women in Pakistan rely on their elder brothers and younger
siblings to whom they give the amount of their reload and their numbers written on papers at times. Housewives also
do the same. In Bangladesh, the same, however, is done primarily by housewives. As indicated above, the cause for
this is to avoid negative commentary on their excess phone use. The majority of the women found this process
reliable and only one woman expressed any concern over her child losing the money on the way. On an average,
children around 8 years and above are the ones who are being given such responsibilities.
Children from the age of 8 to those in their youth are all seen to be using their parents’ phones for the purposes of
sending SMS forwards, typed text messages as well as for downloading ring tones. This is widely visible in Pakistan,
India and Bangladesh. While younger children send sms forwards for their parents on special occasions like Eid,
Ganesh Chaturathi and New Year in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, they also often send blank (empty) messages
to their friends both as a joke and sometimes by mistake to people on their parents’ contact list. Such incidents result
in concerned calls from the other party but are not considered to be a nuisance by the parents. The younger children
use the radio feature frequently as seen in the households of Vaishali in Mumbai, the Afeez in Bangladesh and
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