You seem to have peculiar sense of poor people. Poor people feel the need to communicate too. Since they leave their families and travel to different cities, they have to communicate with their families. These people buy and sell things too. They even fish.
These people aren’t the ones to use cellphones to chit chat and gossip. The cells provides them actual service which helps them earn their livelihood.
Here is an article from WSJ that gives you an idea.
Rural India Snaps Up Mobile Phones - WSJ.com
Some points from the article
While the way his family threshes rice – crushing it with a massive stone roller – hasn’t changed for generations, his phone has changed the way he farms. He uses it to decide when to plant and harvest by calling other farmers, to get the best prices for his rice, coconuts and jasmine by calling wholesalers, and to save hours of time waiting on the road for deliveries and pickups that rarely come on time.
“Life is much better with the cellphone,” he said from his rice paddy in the shadow of the new tower. “I bring it with me to the fields and anyone can reach me here.”
Mr. Srinivasa, like close to half the 800 people in his village, uses Idea Cellular Ltd. as it was the first to bring them service. He paid the equivalent of about $60 for his Nokia phone, and spends about $6 each month for service. Like most rural users, Mr. Srinivasa uses his phone to make voice calls – he doesn’t know how to text message or to download emails. On average rural Indians use their phones around 8.5 hours a month, up 10% over the past year.
The story is the same across rural India, home to more than 60% of India’s population of 1.2 billion. China, Indonesia and Brazil also continue to show solid growth in cellphone sales.
In Khairat, a village 45 miles outside Mumbai that is only accessible on foot or by motorcycle, buffalo farmer Mohan Zore makes around $80 a month but figured he still needed a phone once his village got coverage. He doesn’t have to walk into the market to find out the price of buffalo milk, he now just dials friends at the market from his phone. And he can easily call his son from the fields when he is out grazing his herd.
He used to spend 300 rupees and three hours on a bus to visit his daughter and grandchildren. Now he can catch up with them for one rupee a minute. “The phone saves me money,” he says from his mud-walled home, which he shares with his 20 buffalo.
Mr. Zore can afford a phone because Indian cellular services are among the least expensive in the world. Incoming calls are free and making a call usually costs less than 2 cents a minute. Most of the rural subscribers use prepaid cards for service rather than monthly plans, topping up as needed.
Here is another article that tells you how satellite technology helps in fishing.
The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Remote-sensing helps fishing