Another good example of Indian resourcefulness and the wisdom of recycling creatively (and profitably). Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, is the IT capital of India, home to the campuses of companies such as Microsoft, Oracle or Motorola. At a time when cell phones have taken up the world, there are still plenty of business opportunities in recycling old public phones. Specifically, providing the service of bringing phones to users, rather than the other way around, which used to be the norm not too long ago. The deal is this: a patron buys old coin-operated phones from telecommunication companies at low price (the two in the picture cost $170) and hires an operator to move them, in itinerant phone booths, around the city. The phones are battery-operated, and the operator gets half of the mobile booth earnings, plus the opportunity to sell other items to customers while they are talking on the phone. Ad-hoc commerce at its best. With millions of mobile phone users just wasting minutes (my favorite is to observe all those businessmen calling home as soon as the plane lands just to say they landed OK), recycling old coin-operated phones and making it profitable enough to make a living out of it is simply brilliant. Similar initiatives are happening all over the world –phone bikes in Kampala, mobile phone booths in Nairobi- and teach us that communication is not a privilege of the wealthy.
