Desperately seeking SIM card

India’s fourth-largest city, Hyderabad, works hard to project the image its political leaders and business community want the world to see—that of a bustling modern city, with thriving retail, financial and technology sectors and an educated workforce. Competing with its regional rival, Bengaluru (Bangalore), Hyderabad claims to have more than 1,300 IT firms, most of them in the ostentatiously-named Cyberabad or HITEC City, the acronym for the Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City.

In this city that prides itself on technology, I thought it would be easy to buy a SIM card for my phone and have it activated. Far from it. My story begins at the reception desk of the Taj Deccan Hotel.

“Where’s the nearest mall?” I asked the duty manager. “I need to buy a SIM card.”

“Sir, the City Centre Mall is close by, but I deeply regret to inform you that you will not be able to buy a SIM card there. You must go to a mobile provider shop.”

I didn’t bother asking about the marketing logic of restricting SIM card sales to specific outlets, presumably with limited opening hours.

“OK, please give me the addresses,” I said. The manager wrote down three. “You could walk but, in this heat, I’d advise taking an auto rickshaw.”

I selected the closest one, Airtel, whose address was listed as Road No. 12, Banjara Hills. It seemed a bit imprecise, but I assumed the driver would know where to go.

The duty manager approached me again. “Do you have a copy of your passport face page and visa, also a passport picture?” he asked. “I really need all that?” I answered, but with almost rhetorical resignation. “Yes, and you will need a letter from the hotel stating that this is your local address. I’ll be pleased to write it.”

After assembling the paperwork, I set off in an auto rickshaw. We turned off the main road onto Road No. 12. After a few minutes, I remembered the manager’s remark that I could have walked to the store if the weather had not been so hot. I would not have walked this far, even if the temperature had been 20 degrees lower. We were now moving out of the commercial area, passing a hospital, villas and the gardens of the Income Tax Department guest house.

“I don’t think it’s this far,” I told the driver.

“Where is it you want sir? This is Road No. 12.”

“The Airtel mobile shop.”

“You can buy recharge at many places.”

“No, I need a SIM card, not a recharge. Please turn around.”

Eventually we did, then sat in a traffic jam for 15 minutes as we edged slowly towards the main road. The Airtel store was near the junction and the detour had cost me almost 30 minutes. I joined a line of customers. The sales assistant scrutinized my passport and visa page copies. I was half expecting him to ask for a notarized copy, but he didn’t. His only comment was on the passport picture, which was too large for the box on the registration form. “Feel free to cut it down,” I told him.

I asked when my SIM card would be activated. “Sir, tomorrow is a holiday. It will take three days.” He could sense my displeasure. “But you can go to the Airtel head office and they can activate by this evening.” I asked for the address. It was, at least, reasonably precise: Splendid Towers, near Begumpet police station.

“Yes, sir, I know it well,” said my next auto rickshaw driver. It turned out that he didn’t.  We stopped several times on our way across the city so that he could ask for directions, and once so he could buy a coconut milk. We got there eventually. “I wait for you, sir?” he asked.  I said no. I had no idea how long the transaction would take.

The application form for a SIM card is a page long with many boxes to complete. The sales assistant said he could fill out most of the questions from the information on my passport and visa but needed additional data. “What is the name of your father?” he asked. I wondered briefly about questioning the relevance of this item, considering that my father died 30 years ago, but thought better of it. The assistant was simply following instructions. 

“I also need the names, addresses and mobile numbers for two people in Hyderabad.”  I listed the numbers of two colleagues from the University of Hyderabad, but this time felt justified in asking why their mobile numbers were needed. 

“So we can notify them by text when your SIM card is activated.”

“Why can’t you text me on my number?”

“No, sir, we are not allowed to do this. Please inform them they will receive a text.”

I was about to ask how I was supposed to do this if I did not have a working mobile phone but decided to go with the flow.

“Now you must sign,” said the assistant. I signed in three places on the application form, and on the copies of the passport and visa.  

“I’d like to buy some time while I’m here,” I added.

“We cannot sell you time until your phone is activated,” the assistant replied.

“Seriously?”

He did not see the irony. “You will go online to Airtel. There you will find some most attractive data packages,” he said.

Half an hour later, I was back at the hotel. The expedition had taken more than two hours, and all I had to show for it was a 25-rupee (40 cent) SIM card with no credit. I had spent almost 700 rupees ($10) on circuitous auto rickshaw rides, but at least collected a few travel notes along the way.

Airtel would not accept my credit card. Over dinner, a university colleague said he would add credit and I could pay him back. Later, I received a text saying that 500 rupees had been added, followed by another text saying my credit was under five rupees and I could not make any calls or send texts. I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, the credit had been activated. I felt newly empowered.

The dry side of Hyderabad

The tiny community of NBT Nagar in Hyderabad is squeezed into a narrow strip of land, bounded by railroad tracks, a road, a government school and the wall of a mosque. It has just 29 families—25 Muslim and four Hindu—living in one- and two-room single-story shanties with mud floors. Most have lived there all their lives. The men find casual work as day laborers and auto rickshaw drivers, and the women earn money selling vegetables or cleaning streets and apartments. The alleys are so narrow that you often have to step into a doorway to let another person pass. In monsoon season, the houses are often flooded, and snakes emerge from the bushes along the lake shore on the other side of the railroad tracks to crawl under walls into homes. 

In the middle of NBT Nagar, in what I’ll call a wide place in the alley, is the single water tap serving the whole community. Water supply is always precarious. The line runs from the road to the mosque and then to the tap. During the month of Ramadan, pressure dropped because worshippers used most of the water to perform their ablutions. Sewage leaked into the line and residents complained to the imam. In a thoroughly non-discriminatory action (because it affected Muslims and well as Hindus), he had the water line cut, leaving the community with no water and forcing residents to carry water from another tap further along the road. The water board eventually fixed the line, but supply is still intermittent.

“We have water for about one hour in the morning, every other day,” a woman told my UNICEF colleague Carol. “Sometimes 7:30, sometimes 8:30. We never know. We just have to wait.” While we sat on a straw mat on the side of the road with women from the community, others passed carrying large plastic jugs of water on their shoulders. “They would like to join us but they’re too busy fetching water,” someone said. Everyone laughed.

The UNICEF team had joined staff from the community-based organization Basthi Vikas Manch (BVM; literally, Slum Development Platform), which campaigns for water rights in the slums of Hyderabad, on field visits to communities to try to understand why so many people in this densely-populated metropolitan area lack safe, clean water. Predictably, the arrival of outsiders in NBT Nagar attracted a crowd. About a dozen women sat talking with us, with BVM organizer Sunny Rai (his real name, and most of the time he’s smiling) translating from Telugu.

The group fell silent when an older woman arrived. The women shuffled aside to give her the most prominent position on the mat. She said she could speak for the community because she was the general secretary of the local branch of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the ruling party in the state of Telangana. Meanwhile, an official from the human rights office of the state administration buttonholed me to give me her mobile number. Someone had called to tell them that foreigners and BVM organizers were holding a meeting about water in NBT Nagar. They sped to the scene to take over the agenda. What had begun as a meeting with community members had been shanghaied by the politicians.

In densely-populated urban areas all over India, water and sanitation are high on the political agenda. Local politicians make campaign promises to bring water and public toilets to communities, but as soon as the election is over the commitments are forgotten (at least until the next election). In Hyderabad, community members are left to complain to the officials and engineers of the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB). Underfunded and stifled by bureaucracy, HMWS&SB is ill-equipped to maintain its existing infrastructure, let alone expand it to serve communities such as NBT Nagar. 

Despite the claims of its local secretary, the TRS has done little to help NBT Nagar residents. After several appeals from BVM, water board officials visited the community.  Residents pointed out that although their dwellings were modest, they all had electricity and paid their bills. Why not water too? The officials agreed to install lines and water meters but reneged a few weeks later when residents could not produce legal titles to their land and houses. BVM reminded officials that the board had provided taps to other slum communities where the legal titles were as iffy as in NBT Nagar. The HMWSSB said it would review and respond. 

No one holds out much hope that will happen. Indian babus are skilled at burying paperwork in the large and dark holes between management levels and functions or rejecting it on technical grounds—an illegible signature, the lack of an official stamp, an ambiguous reference to state or federal statute. Most people, says BVM, do not know their water rights, and even if they do, they lack the capacity to demand them from officials who fear they will lose their jobs if they take any initiative. BVM helps by drafting petitions and occasionally takes a case to court, but there’s a limit to what a small community-based organization can do.

City authorities estimate there are more than 1,600 slums—many of them larger than NBT Nagar—in the metropolitan area with about 12 per cent of the population (more than a million people) living in them. The slum designation provides a useful pretext for taking over land, especially when residents cannot prove legal title. Indeed, the authorities have little incentive to improve services to communities such as NBT Nagar. With property prices rising, private developers are eyeing slum areas. A few hundred yards from NBT Nagar is a modern apartment block with views of the lake. It’s probably only a matter of time before the authorities evict the residents of NBT Nagar and demolish their homes. If the bulldozers move in, the residents will be homeless or forced to squat on land on the outskirts of the city. They will not have the money to travel into the city to work. And they probably won’t have water.

NBT Nagar’s water problems are mirrored in urban and rural areas all over India. At the macro-level, India is not a dry country, at least compared with some African and other Asian countries; per person, India has twice as much water as arid northern China. The problem is that it receives most of it during the four-month monsoon season, beginning in June, and some areas have far less than others. In 2016, after two years of poor monsoons, India faced its worst water crisis since independence. Rivers ran dry, and wells were exhausted; destitute farmers migrated to cities, and some committed suicide. The central and state governments responded by dispatching water trains and tanker trucks to parched regions and announcing new irrigation and water diversion projects. One, priced at $165 billion, would involve 37 links between rivers, most by canals—almost 1,000 miles of artificial waterways.

Such big-ticket projects, touted by politicians, make headlines but fail to address basic problems. Underground aquifers, not rivers, lakes or dams, supply two thirds of the water used for irrigation and more than three quarters of drinking water. With so many wells and pumps drawing water, ground water levels have been falling. In a perverse effort to boost agricultural production, some states provide free or cheap electricity to farmers; this encourages them to pump ground water to flood their fields and grow water-guzzling crops such as rice. In some states, rivers are dammed to provide hydro-electricity, while farmers downstream pray for rain. At the same time, half of India’s villages have inadequate drinking water. Canals built to bring water to urban areas lose up to 70 per cent of their supply.

It’s not as if the water problem is a new one. In the 16th century, the sultans of the Qutb Shahi dynasty built a network of artificial lakes, called tanks, in Hyderabad to hold water. Some, such as the small lake across the railroad tracks from NBT Nagar, remain. Others in prime residential and commercial districts have been filled in by developers. Hyderabad has to pump much of its water from rivers and reservoirs and try to maintain an aging supply system. Every day, the HMWS&SB’s fleet of blue and yellow water tankers are on the streets, delivering water to paying customers and slum communities. Their slogan is “Water is precious—Every drop counts.” There’s no sign that many people, least of all the politicians, take that message to heart.