Tag: India smartphones

Certain places in the western state of Gujarat have said that these devices are too “distracting” for girls and single women.

A number of villages in Gujarat, a state in the western part of India, have now banned single women and girls from owning and using mobile phones, as the village leaders claim that these devices will distract them from being able to focus on their studies.

The bans have gone into effects over recent weeks and have drawn the attention of the international community.

The banning of mobile phones for girls and single women is most prevalent in the villages located in Gujarat’s Mehsana and Banaskantha districts. That said, it appears as though additional villages will also be joining this campaign, according to the president of the district council of Mehsana, Ranjit Singh Thakor. This ban stops unmarried women and girls under the age of 18 from being able to own and use the mobile devices.

Thakor stated that “The girls don’t study properly if they have mobile phones, and they can get into all sorts of bad situations.”

This was quoted during a phone interview with the Thompson Reuters Foundation. Thakor also added, “Let them study, get married, then they can get their own phones. Until then, they can use their fathers’ phones at home, if necessary.”

Other villages in India had already taken this kind of step in banning mobile devices among female users , though it didn’t capture as much attention as is the case with this latest addition. On the eastern side of the country in the state of Bihar, a similar ban had been put into place a few years ago. In that case, they explained that the use of the mobile devices was encouraging women to elope and was therefore “debasing the social atmosphere.”

Activists have been protesting the decisions made by the towns, saying that banning females of any age or social status from using mobile phones is an assault on their freedom and it could potentially deny those women and girls the access they need access to protection, potentially placing them in harm’s way.

Last year, India had already managed to produce an estimated 100 million of the devices.

India has started to define itself as a worldwide hub for the production of mobile phones and, as such, it is now lining itself up to reach the tremendous milestone of 500 million units within the next two years.

The Department of Telecom (DoT) announced that this growth is spiking due to very specific reasons.

A statement from the DoT said that the production of mobile phones has been able to grow at this considerable rate due to a solid incentive policy as well as having quality talent readily available. J.S. Deepak, the Telecom Secretary, explained that “The number of phones being manufactured was 10 million sometime back (now it has increased) to 100 million. The time has come when we will reach 500 million, may be in 2 years.”

Deepak pointed out that a differential tariff was assisting domestic manufacturers in the mobile phones market.

That said, while speaking on ART (Adjudication, Regulation, Telecommunication) of Convergence at a TDSAT seminar, he also shared that the differential tariff was also helpful to areas other than mobile technology, such as in consumer electronics, medical electronics, in addition to broadband set-up boxes and equipment.

Deepak added that with the incentive policies and the strong talent base, the country has started to define itself in the worldwide market for the manufacture of mobile devices, particularly in the area of lower-end cell phones.

This is one of several efforts being made by the Indian government in the hope of decreasing electronic product imports in order to be able to meet domestic market product requirements by creating its own solid structure of production.

In response to this move in India, a number of different large electronic device makers have started to step into the country. Among those companies have included Lenovo, Micromax, Gionee, Lava, Xiaomi, and OnePlus. This has allowed India to define itself among the most rapidly growing mobile phone markets on the planet. It is not surprising that this is presenting a considerable appeal to device makers from the rest of the globe.