When you are packed like sardines in a can, with no close prospect of getting out in a hurry, you have to find a way to entertain yourself. At least, Mumbai’s peak hour commuters — thousands of men and women who seesaw between the suburbs and downtown everyday — have learnt to develop their own quirky methods of killing time. Some work on crossword puzzles published in cheap regional eveningers. Gujarati traders use their time to make more money by placing bets while playing cards. A few Maharashtrian commuters even sing bhajans during their arduous commutes. And 27-year-old Deepak Gajbhiye plays cricket.

Every morning, while his train rattles its way from Dahisar to Churchgate, Gajbhiye plays his favourite shots on his grey 3530 GPRS-enabled Nokia mobile. “Sometimes I don’t realise how an hour passes by. Gaming is good for people like me,” says Gajbhiye.

He was one of the 10 mobile gamers in India playing a cricket game, Rahul Dravid XI, who would get a chance to meet and dine with the Indian vice-captain later this month, thanks to a contest organised by Hutch telecom. Gajbhiye figured among three Hutch subscribers from Mumbai who ranked among the top scorers.

Gajbhiye is merely one of the steadily increasing breed of mobile users who download and play new games on their mobile phones. His family is based in Bhopal, and Gajbhiye — a section engineer with Western Railways — has enough time on his hands.

“I moved to Mumbai a year ago for work and I share my flat with other friends. We don’t yet have a TV, so mobile gaming is my chief source of entertainment,” he says.

He purchased a GPRS-(General Packet Radio Service) enabled phone when he heard that he could play games on it. Days after he bought the phone, Hutch announced the Rahul Dravid XI contest where mobile gamers could compete with each other and win a chance to meet the star of India’s Pakistan tour. He downloaded the game from the Hutch website for a one-time download fee of Rs 99, and, since then, he has been “batting like God”.

Gaming has been a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide, but cellular telephony has provided a huge boost to the industry. Two years ago, mobile gaming was restricted to select high-end cellular handset users. But, in the last one year, it appears to have emerged as the fastest growing application in the cellular industry in India, recording a 50-fold increase in usage, say industry sources.

“In February 2003, we had an average of 2,200 mobile game downloads a month. Today, our users are downloading an average of 1,20,000 games a month,” says Harit Nagpal, vice-president, corporate marketing, Hutch.

As the community of mobile gamers increases, cellular operators like Reliance, Hutch and Air Tel are frantically adding new Java-based games every day to their growing stock. Hutch, for instance, offers over 250 games to users who possess a GPRS-enabled mobile handset for a one-time fee, while Reliance offers more than 40 games free to its subscriber base of eight million subscribers across the country.

For users like Gajbhiye, mobile companies have spread out a wide range of games. Gajbhiye can imagine himself to be Juan Pablo Montoya and race against Michael Schumacher in a Formula One racing game. Or he can be the Prince of Persia and embark on an action adventure. He can engage in a game of chess with Anatoly Karpov or play King Galamar of Thorin kingdom and try to win an ancient war with twin brother Valadorn.

There are over a dozen game categories including sports, racing, mindgames and war games. Game developers haven’t spared Bollywood either. For instance, games promoting the Abhishek-Aishwarya starrer Kuchh Na Kaho, or the Sanjay-Suniel-Bipasha starrer Rudraksh are popular with gamers.

As the demand for new games rises, game development companies are mushrooming much like dotcoms did during the Internet boom in the Nineties. The industry says that six out of 10 games used internationally are developed in India.

“Development of games is a big business. Some 150,000 games are downloaded per month in India. Besides, Indian game developers are competing in the international arena. Gaming has already become a Rs 40-crore business in India,” claims Arun Gupta, CEO, Mauj, a game development company of People Interactive Group, which also runs the matrimonial website Shaadi.com.

Mauj is one of the big players in the game development market along with Indiagames, Mobile2win, Paradox Studios and other firms providing content to cellular companies. “Indian games have done well in the international market. Spiderman developed by Indiagames was top of the international gaming charts,” says Gupta, flaunting his cool Nokia cameraphone in his Worli office.

According to Gupta, the growth of the mobile gaming market would directly depend on the GPRS connectivity in mobile handsets. Right now, a GPRS-enabled phone — accounting for 4,00,000 out of the 30-million GSM handset market — costs upwards of Rs 12,000, though it is available in the the grey market for Rs 7,000. “We expect the Centre to implement some tax cuts which will bring the cost of GPRS phones within the buying range of middle-class users,” says Gupta optimistically.

The other big player in the mobile market, Reliance, has made mobile games a key service in its bouquet of value-added services. Till the end of this month, Reliance’s Indiamobile will offer free downloads to game enthusiasts. Says Mahesh Prasad, president, applications & solutions group, Reliance Infocomm, “Reliance opened up the mobile gaming market. Till we entered the market, gaming was restricted to a few GPRS phones. But, our games go out to all six million subscribers irrespective of whether they have a low-end phone or the high-end camcorder with colour handsets.”

Last month, Reliance started offering a multi-player facility which enables a user in Mumbai to play the same game with one in Calcutta. “The GPRS handsets have to deal with lower speed and coverage problems, but downloads can be faster on CDMA technology which has a greater bandwidth,” says Anurag Khurana, CEO of Paradox Studios, a Reliance-funded game developer.

“Compared to PC-based or web-based gaming, mobile gaming offers greater accessibility to gaming enthusiasts,” says 30-year-old Khurana. A mobile game can be developed within four to eight weeks as against the 12 to 36 months that are needed for a good PC-based game. “So, you can be more adventurous in creating mobile games,” Khurana says.

As for Gajbhiye, he has already downloaded two new mindgames on his Nokia. And he is going to move to a new adventure soon after that dinner with Dravid.