Mobile phones can do many more things than simply support ordinary voice calls. In India, value-added services (VAS)—all applications other than voice—currently account for approximately 7 percent of wireless revenues. The total VAS market in India in 2007 was approximately US$900 million, up from US$678 million in 2006. (18)

As in many other countries, the leading VAS applications in India are short message service (SMS)-based text messaging (which accounts for more than 55 percent of VAS revenues) and downloadable ringtones. According to a recent report, the current “killer applications” for VAS in India are Bollywood-related content and cricket results. One of the most popular applications in India (much as in the United States) has been voting via SMS for finalists on the TV show Indian Idol. In September 2007, the show’s two finalists drew more than 70 million SMS votes, generating revenues of INR 21 crore (US$5.2 million).

The number of SMS messages sent in India is expected to grow from 59 billion messages in 2006 to 180 billion in 2010. (19) Although the vast majority of text messages are exchanged between individuals, several new informational and other services that use text messaging (such as the voting discussed above) have been introduced in India in recent years. These services suggest the increasingly broad range of applications that mobile phones can provide.

In October 2007, for example, Google India launched a service that allows mobile phone users to retrieve business listings, movie show times, weather reports, dictionary definitions, and other kinds of information through SMS. Another novel use for text messaging, according to an article in The Hindustan Times, is “microblogging:”

At 21, Ludhiana management student Harjinder Singh already has a mega project in hand, albeit in a micro medium. His 160-character blog posts, punched out on his Nokia handset, instantaneously reach 57,659 Sikhs across India all at the cost of a single SMS. “I aim to arouse the pride of young Sikhs through my writings,” says Singh, who started blogging on his phone last May. “Many of my Sikh readers voted for Ludhiana’s Ishmeet Singh in Star Plus’s Voice of India and contributed to his victory,” he adds. Singh has hired two people to get him cell numbers of 200,000 Sikhs, because he wants to reach “one in ten Sikhs soon.”

In Delhi, Lalchung Siem, a 33-year-old Food Corporation of India employee, whips out his phone several times a day to blog in Hmar, a tribal language spoken by a small group of people in India. His posts are sent free to 6,106 readers in the North-East by SMSGupShup, a microblogging platform. “Recently, I got an SOS call after two boys fell in a river in Saidan village, Manipur. I flashed the SMS on my blog, and within minutes, a hundred people reached the spot, and managed to rescue one of the boys,” he says. (20)

SMS-based services also are providing valuable health and agricultural information. A texting service that provides information and advice about HIV/AIDS was launched in 2006 by the Heroes Project sponsored by the Richard Gere Foundation India Trust, Parmeshwar Godrej, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Using the Specific Query Response (SQR) system, users can submit questions about HIV/AIDS to the Star Care service and get a personalized response from a trained medical counselor via SMS within 24 hours. The project was reported to have received more than 25,000 queries in its first month of operation. (21)

An interactive service called Almost All Questions Answered (aAQUA), created by the Developmental Informatics Lab at IIT Bombay, is providing farmers in the state of Maharashtra (and elsewhere in India) with advice on a broad range of agricultural topics, ranging from better farming methods to marketing strategies. Farmers can register for the service at no charge and submit questions in English, Hindi, or Marathi via a Web site or via SMS. Experts at agricultural universities respond to the questions. (22)

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