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Billing for your mobile and electronics shop in Odisha

The wet phone that is only checked, the charge in a power cut and the torch before a storm all get a line.

An older man in a patterned cap crouching outdoors with a phone held to his ear
An older man in a patterned cap crouching outdoors with a phone held to his ear Photo: Digvijaysjanoti, CC BY-SA 4.0

Tools for a counter that checks, charges and sells lights as well as phones

  • Low stock warnings

    A sign that emergency lights, torches or power banks are running down when the weather warning comes, not after the storm has passed.

  • Orders to suppliers

    An order to the wholesaler for screens and lights, with a note of the day they arrive, so a repair does not wait on a part nobody wrote down.

  • Daily reports

    The wet-week checks billed that day, read at night beside the phones sold, so the repair money of the rainy fortnight is seen apart from the week's sales.

A phone opened for repair beside its new screen, battery and screwdriver
A phone opened for repair beside its new screen, battery and screwdriver Photo: Triskal, CC BY-SA 4.0

Puja gifts, prawn farms and ore mines: who buys phones in Odisha's districts

Phones are bought for festivals, for work and for family far away. A few districts, and what the people there do.

  • Cuttack is home to silver filigree, and its craftsmen get business from the city's Durga Puja, which had 165 puja committees in 2019.
  • Balasore district has been declared Odisha's production and processing cluster for scampi, the freshwater prawn.
  • Keonjhar is one of Odisha's top mineral districts. Iron ore covers most of it, and manganese ore is found at Joda East and Barbil.
  • Berhampur in Ganjam is often called the silk city of India, and its Phoda Kumbha saree and Joda craft got a GI tag in 2012.

Why an Odisha mobile shop earns on wet phones, power-cut charging and storm-night lights, and bills none of them

  1. The wet phone that is only checked

    In the rains customers bring phones that fell in water, dried in a bag of rice. You open one, look, tell the owner it is dead or it will live, and she goes away. It took you twenty minutes and a screwdriver, and nobody was billed. A dozen of these in a wet week are a dozen unpaid half hours. The wet phone often comes back a second time, and you do not remember what you told the owner the first time.

  2. The power cut and the line of people with chargers in their hands

    When the power goes for a night, or for days after a storm, people stand at your counter with their phones to charge them, because yours has a socket and a battery backup. You take a rupee or two, or nothing, and you do not write it down. The shop is the busiest it has been all month, and the day's sales do not show it.

  3. The emergency light every house wants the night before the storm

    When the weather warning comes, people want torches, emergency lights and power banks, and they want them that evening. The shelf holds a few of each and a customer asks for the one that is gone. You find out how many you had only by counting the empty hooks, and the next lot is two days away, after the storm has come and gone.

A repair technician's hands holding a soldering iron over a phone, with spare phones and a power bank on the bench
A repair technician's hands holding a soldering iron over a phone, with spare phones and a power bank on the bench Photo: Johnnybam, CC BY-SA 4.0

From the wet phone left in a bag of rice to the emergency light counted before the storm

  • A check is an item with its own rate

    Make the check an item with a small rate. Bill it when you open a wet phone and tell the owner what you found. Twelve checks in a wet week are twelve lines in the day's sales, and the half hours begin to pay for the screwdriver.

  • A charge is an item too, billed per phone

    Make charging an item with a rate for one phone. When the line stands at the counter in a power cut, each phone is a quick bill and the money lands in the day's sales. At night you can read how much the dark night earned.

  • The storm night's lights, read the next morning

    Make each kind of torch and emergency light its own item. The morning after a storm night, open that evening's bills and read how many of each kind went. The next time a warning comes you know how many to hold, and your order to the wholesaler is for that number.

Questions Odisha mobile shop owners ask about wet phones, charging and storm-night stock

A dried phone I gave back comes again a week later with the same trouble. What do I tell the owner?

Open the family's page. The first check is there with its day, so you show the owner what you saw the first time. The second visit is a new line on the same page, and the owner sees both.

A customer leaves a phone to charge and goes to the market. How do I know which phone is whose?

Put the customer's name and the phone's colour in the charge item's line when you take it in. Bill the charge when she collects the phone, so the night's count of charges matches the phones that went back.

A wet phone stays with me for three days to dry. How do I write the day it came in?

Put the day in the check item's name when you take the phone, and bill the check when it goes back. The days the phone spent with you are on the page the owner can read.

More questions every shop asks

Sundargarh's steel plant and the chromite works of Kalinganagar

Sundargarh is an industrial district of Odisha, with a steel plant, a fertilizer plant, a cement factory and spinning mills. A phone shop near plants like these counts the people who work in them among its customers.

Industrial firms at Kalinganagar in Jajpur district use chromite ore, and a sharp price rise in 2021 pushed several plants towards closure. When a plant slows down, the families around it buy less, and a phone shop feels it too.