The Evolution of Mobile Technology in Bangladesh Kamal Quadir
Every country has competitive advantages, and Bangladesh has its fair share. While the country has fertile, flat land that yields four crops a year and keeps its citizens productive year-round, its 160 million people live in an area only as large as Wisconsin. Capitalizing on its flat land and large population, Bangladesh has boomed with mobile technology since the late 1990s. In the early days a favorable government policy also contributed to its development, and wireless service came free of charge. Mobile technology spread its roots across Bangladesh with a drive to improve the country’s socioeconomic conditions. Most significantly, mobile technology reached the indigenous, as the pervasiveness of the program allowed for bottom-up proliferation. In the first decade of the millennium, Bangladesh was one of the fastest-growing mobile-penetrated countries. By 2014 over 67 million people were using more than one hundred million mobiles; this amounted to 99% coverage across the country, far surpassing those rates of its neighboring countries. The mobile handset has become one of the most democratizing tools in human history. Efficient and cost-effective, it provides universal access and higher-level communication. Mobile technology has led to advancement in every way. It empowers people; it has had profound effects on the underprivileged, lower castes, and even the adivasi, who previously had no such tool. When such progress is multiplied by hundreds of millions, the impact of this new efficiency becomes astronomical. But the impact surpasses communication. Today’s $15 phone has more processing power than the computer NASA used in 1969 to send a man to the moon. Phones are powerful machines; each has a screen, a keyboard, a battery, and is wireless by default. A poor person with a phone, then, can communicate just as well Harvard South Asia Institute 29