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"Now we enter the area of absence of network", our translator, Amrit Singh, turned and told me. A few minutes earlier, my phone had pinged emails, text messages, and Instagram notifications. They stopped completely.
We continued for 30 minutes, chatting and looking at the arid landscape, suddenly without our six-inch screens to look after us. After a few kilometers, we arrived at a small group of mud houses, a village called Bida.
We installed our camera to interrogate Sawal Singh, a man who said he was 35 but looked more than 50. Amrit translating from Marwadi – the local language – and encouraging our nervous interviewee, we asked him he knew what was the Internet. Singh gave us a blank look.
When I asked if he had a cell phone, he brandished a device smaller than his palm with a numbered keyboard. It was then a little more lively explaining that there was a "big problem of tour" in the area. He showed us how he had to climb a big tree in the middle of the village to make calls. Sometimes it works, especially not.
"I want to talk to my children who live in the city," said Jamna Devi, a resident of the nearby village of Faledi. "If someone falls sick, how to call a doctor? If our animals get lost, how to call the neighboring villages to find out where they went?"
Some of the youngest villagers actually had a smartphone, those who went to Jaisalmer to work as day laborers, one day a day by bus, to the city. There, they would use WhatsApp and YouTube, unnecessary services in their unconnected village. And even in the city, they often do not have time to use them, except waiting for the return of the bus.
"Are we working and making our living or are we watching YouTube?" says a frustrated young man named Rahul. He has a Chinese smartphone that cost him about 10,000 rupees ($ 140), a month's salary.
My reporting trip the week before could not have been more different.
Flipkart's head office in the upscale Embassy Tech Village neighborhood in Bangalore occupies three 10-storey towers each, with a dozen restaurants and a rooftop basketball court. These tours host approximately 8,000 employees of Flipkart's leading online sales company. Hundreds of others work for its digital payment and fashion affiliates. The neighboring offices house world names such as WeWork and Xiaomi.
And as more and more people in the world of Jamna Devi and Sawal Singh join the company dominated by companies like Flipkart, the effects will be felt far beyond India.
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