Introduction

We report from an on-going research study of cyber cafes¹ in and around Mumbai metropolis. Many small businesses in Mumbai operate in and through a grey market of non-formal business practices. Informality pervades the warp and woof of these businesses. They are often developed through dispersed family ties and local social networks, and sometimes rely on underground connections to run and maintain their day-to-day transactions.

Our focus, in this paper, is to explore the fit of information technologies into this parallel domain of non-formal practices. We use ethnographic explorations to give voice and visibility to the small business of cyber-cafes. We attempt to reveal how cybercafé businesses discover survival niches, sustain social networks and adapt organizational strategies to endure an uncertain marketplace.²

Our research is based on open-ended interviews among 30 cyber café owners in town, suburban and outer suburban Mumbai, conducted during August 2006 to April 2007. Cyber cafés are an increasing presence in Mumbai as they are in many parts of Urban India. Proliferating cafés have made it a highly competitive business with small margins. In our study, most of the 31 cafés are in low-middle income neighborhoods and 6 out of these are in the midst of bustling slums/shanty towns, 5 in Dharavi and 1 in a South-east suburb (we consider Dharavi in a separate section). We deliberately chose these neighborhoods to understand the interplay between business practices and the demand for ICTs in low-income populations living in poor infrastructural living conditions. More importantly, non-formality entrenched in the commercial cultures of poor locales provide an opportunity to study ICTs away from IT business parks.

Our understanding of the ‘non-formal economy’ in Mumbai is similar to and builds upon the notion of ‘the informal sector’, a term used by Keith Hart (1973) to describe unregulated, small scale economic and social exchanges in urban Ghana, whose individual economic transactions do not ever rise to the taxable limit. The informal sector is frequently considered synonymous with survival strategies of the poor, where economic transactions may range from daily wage labor to economic exchanges that are unregulated or remain untaxed. Mumbai is home to an extraordinarily vibrant and organic commercial culture as well as a thriving shadow economy, with businesses crisscrossing the formal and non-formal at various points.³ As a result, mainstream (and audited) economic practices are subsidized when people enter into informal business relationships. The state, in turn, exploits the situation by aligning illegally with these businesses for a price (Srivastava, 2003).

We studied small cybercafés (own-account, less than five employees) and use the term non-formal economy, for the purposes of this paper, to denote the unregulated nature of small businesses⁴.

Information and communication technologies, ICTs, are considered a privilege of technologically mature ecologies used by an informed populace in countries deploying huge infrastructural investments. How do the same technologies organise themselves into small enterprises in developing economies like India? Here, the IT sector is abuzz with opportunities for livelihoods spawning a host of business ranging from formal cutting edge software development to dubious para-legal outfits buying and selling computing hardware, software solutions and internet access. Non-formal relations underscoring developing economies are nothing new. Our research forays into the contextual specificity of Mumbai providing an interesting case-study of internet technologies adapting to the demands of a broader shadow economy of the metropolis. The normative forms of internet technologies and the structure of Mumbai’s economy combine to endure in locations some where between the formal and the non-formal, the secured and the unsecured and the legal and the para-legal⁵. The dialectic of the two processes surrounds the liminal status of the cyber café as small business. We bring to surface the constant dialectic and adjustments the two sectors engage in. The big clash seemingly occurs when organizational commitment to entrench ICTs by the state, corporates and other legal players encounter non-formal ICT businesses at the grass-roots. It might be safe to say the two have come of age co-existing and adjusting to sociological forces binding them. This nexus becomes inevitable with the expansion of ICT markets and usages depending heavily on these small businesses. We, thus far, see two social blocks, the quasi-legitimate users and the legitimate expanders of ICT, and the necessary interrelationships they need to contend with. Hence the dilemma, of ICTs emerging from a digital rights domain conflicting with the expansion of its user base, a market in constant confrontation with legality. The focus of an earlier paper dwelt on three interrelated contexts crucial to cyber regulation in India: the grass-root, the state and the non-formal economy. While cyber café managers ‘dismiss their responsibility to police on-line security, state level initiatives show contradictions in their stated enthusiasm for an IT enabled society and sporadic regulatory behaviour directing public usage of the internet (Rangaswamy 2007).

Extant literature around urban cyber café in India is scant. Apart from Haseloff (2005) we found little scholarly engagement with internet cafes. Haseloff’s consideration of urban cyber cafes focused on their being potential development tools complementing the telecentre movement in rural regions. Research was conducted ‘to explore the problems and potential of cybercafés as development tools for different urban communities’. The study gave us a good overview of urban internet cafés and a starting point for our research. However, we move away to probe the specific trait of non-formal small businesses in Mumbai and the fit of cyber café operations into these.

Our study enabled seeing, hearing and recording albeit partially, the voices, transactions and deals of the everyday in the internet café, located at this intersection of the formal and the non-formal. The dynamics of transacting in any of the cafés is borne out by processes that are organic, spontaneous, necessitated by existing market relations and economic structures of survival. As ethnographers and researchers we don a role by not taking sides against the ‘unregulated’ but problematising legality in these spaces. To representthe non-formal is not to celebrate its grit or subversion but point to its enduring form.

The Mumbai Mosaic⁶

“… I am French…. I am gay, I am Jewish and I am a criminal, more or less in that order. Bombay is the only city I have ever found that allows me to be all four of those things, at the same time…”⁷

The quote pretty much captures the generous spirit of survival and accommodation extended by the megapolis to droves of humanity seeking a place under its sun, a city described as ‘India’s symbol of uneven modernity, and hectic contradictory character of the nation’s modern life’ (Khilnani 1997).

Mumbai is a site of various uncertainties; of employment, wages, housing, citizenship and security. People, drawn by their already established kindred come to her in large numbers from impoverished rural areas to find lively hoods, even if it offers a six by six foot space to sleep and work is often difficult to obtain and retain. To quote Appadurai,

“Frequently, these are cities where crime is an integral part of municipal order and where the circulation of wealth in the form of cash is ostentatious and immense, but the sources of cash are always restricted, mysterious, or unpredictable. The everyday is shot through with socially mediated chains of debt—between friends, neighbors, and coworkers—stretched across the continuum between multinational banks and other organized lenders, on the one hand, and loan sharks and thugs, on the other” (2000:628)

A significant contextual factor, before we turn towards empirical discussion, is that Mumbai is not representative of India at large. Mumbai is extreme in terms of average income, cost of living, and the gap between rich and poor. A metropolis of very rich and desperately poor, of a relatively large and prosperous ‘middle class’, and site of concentrations of huge slums in Asia (Nijman, 2006). Quoting Naregal (2000) from another unregulated terrain, the cable communication business in Mumbai;

“Historically, Mumbai’s economic success has always been built upon ‘a pragmatic and most ruthless exploitation of her far-from-perfect communication and commercial networks’. These have, quite visibly, since the 1970s, bred what has been described as a ‘robber-baron’⁸ culture of economic speculation and processes… The privatization of public sector, the speculative rise and fall of the city’s stock markets, national inflationary trends, a growing consumerist ethos, shrinking employment in the formal sector have created thriving interfaces between the under-world and the ‘cleaner’ capitalistic sectors(pp296)”.