India has already built the world’s cheapest car – the £1,250 Tata Nano – now the country has unveiled the telecoms equivalent: the £10 "people’s phone".
The mobile handset, developed by Spice, the Indian telecoms group that is listed in Bombay and worth £1 billion, is angled at the very lowest end of the market.
This means the phone has jettisoned all "non-essential" features – such as a screen. "It is just a phone," said Bhupendra Kumar Modi, the Spice chairman, who hopes to sell about 10 million in the next year.
Mobile phones priced under about £20 account for only about a fifth of the global market.