India Uses SMS to Get Water, Issue Parliament Whips
Date: 22-Apr-05
Country: INDIA
Author: Terry Friel
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and the government and opposition "whips" responsible for assembly attendance are now using Short Message Service (SMS) to summon lawmakers for crucial votes or to muster a quorum, officials say.
"This lets us contact them immediately," Azad's spokesman told Reuters on Thursday. "We are in the process of collecting the MPs' mobile numbers. The drive is on."
Unlike many other parliaments, India's lower house, or Lok Sabha, does not have an inbuilt alarm system to summon the 545 legislators to the chamber for a vote or to make up the numbers.
Instead, it relies on an antiquated landline phone network and word of mouth around the sprawling circular sandstone building and the surrounding neighbourhood annexes and canteens.
The world's most populous democracy is also its fastest-growing mobile phone market, adding about two million customers a month.
But it has one of the lowest rates of landline installation. Fewer than half the 100 million phone lines are fixed. The rest are mobiles.
SMS, or "texting", is a booming value-added service worth billions of dollars worldwide -- about 10 billion SMSs were sent in China during the Chinese New Year holiday in mid-Feb. alone.
SMS was used to campaign in last year's Indian election.
It is already popular with tech-crazy Indians for downloading ringtones and pictures, for entering competitions and for checking rail and flight schedules and news and cricket scores.
But while Indian governments have been quick to pick up on the Internet -- you can book one of the 13 million daily train seats across the country instantly on the Net, for example -- they have trailed the private sector in SMS. Until now.
As New Delhi heads into its sizzling summer, where temperatures approach 50 degrees Celsius (more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit), the capital's government-run water board this month opened an SMS complaint hotline.
From water theft and contamination to broken pipes and tankers that fail to turn up to parched, waterless slums, customers can now register their complaints instantly, avoiding the traditional bureaucratic run-around, the board promises.
In emergencies, water tankers can be sent immediately.
Even at the best of times and in the best of neighbourhoods, water is a major worry for the almost 14 million people living in Delhi, where the pipes trickle only a couple of hours a day.
