Phones are catching up with TVs, and the number of phones being used by ‘bottom of the pyramid’ households have already outpaced the number of radios and computers in South Asia, researchers have said.

LIRNEasia, a Sri Lanka-based Asia-Pacific information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organisation, said in India a hundred bottom of the pyramid (BOP) households now had 50 TVs, 38 phones, 28 radios and one computer.

Radio has been displaced from its No.2 position after television in India. In India, and also Pakistan and Bangladesh, at the bottom of the pyramid, the mobile is more prevalent than the radio.

Respective prevalence of TV, phone, radio and computer in South Asia and around is as follows: Bangladesh (52, 41, 13, 0); Pakistan (68, 39, 24, 3); India (50, 38, 28, 1); Sri Lanka (80, 64, 77, 4); the Philippines (63, 50, 52, 1); and Thailand (75, 70, 64, 12).

Since January, Washington State residents and small businesses have been allowed to drop off their televisions, computers and computer monitors free of charge to one of 200 collection points around the state. They have responded by dumping more than 15 million pounds of electronic waste, according to state collection data. If disposal continues at this rate, it will amount to more than five pounds for every man, woman and child per year.

In Sri Lanka, the Environment Ministry is collecting massive amounts of money from mobile usage, in the name of recycling mobile phones. There are more TV sets in the country than mobiles and they are bigger and therefore constitute a greater threat. What is the Ministry doing with our money?

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Until recently, I believed, with Richard Heeks quoted below, that radio is found in more homes (at the BOP or all) than phones and TVs. Survey data from the BOP at three countries that account for the world’s greatest concentration of poor people (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) tell a story that contradicts the common wisdom. In India, 58% of BOP households have TVs, while only 32% have radios. And some kind of phone in the household? 45%!  In all six countries, TV is present in more BOP households than radios.  And radio is less a player in TOP households, who have probably relegated it to the car.

Finally, some have asked if the Internet should be the focus or if developers should look at where the poor have already “voted with their wallets” and see whether the simpler, cheaper technologies already in use can deliver sufficient ICT functionality to make a difference. Rather than wait for handset and bandwidth upgrades to allow mobile Internet access, we must determine what can be achieved for development through calls and SMS and, possibly, older technologies. Access figures are hard to come by, but we can estimate that something like 80 percent of the population in developing countries has access to a radio, 50 percent to a television.2,3 Early in ICT4D’s history, these statistics prompted the swift reinterpretation of ICT to incorporate radio and television, and foreshadowed the role convergence would play in ICT4D 2.0. Looking at the technologies that already penetrate—mobiles, radios, televisions—developers must now seek ways to add computing and Internet functionality.

We are so smitten with screens that we often can’t bear to choose one over another: 31 percent of Internet use occurs while we’re in front of a TV set. We are also taking an interest in watching video on our phones: 100 million handsets are video-capable.