The mobile phone reached Punjab villages in the 2000s and the smartphone in the 2010s, and both arrived faster here than in most Indian states because there was money coming in from abroad and a reason to call.
It changed the emigration relationship first. A family in a Doaba village and a son in Vancouver went from a letter every few weeks to a daily video call, and the emotional structure of that relationship changed with it.
It changed agriculture: prices, weather and inputs are checked on a phone, and the extension service now sends messages.
It changed politics: the informal Punjabi digital media described elsewhere on this site reaches villages and the diaspora simultaneously and answers to nobody.
It also ended the satth, the trinjan and a good deal of the rest of what is described on this site, more completely than any policy or displacement did.
The single largest change in Punjabi daily life in the last thirty years was not political and nobody planned it.
Mobile coverage reached rural Punjab early and completely, and the smartphone arrived with cheap data around 2016 and changed how the state communicates within about two years.
The phone is how the money is sent, how the family abroad is seen, how the land record is checked and how the news arrives, in that order of importance to most households.
It also replaced the street, the akhara and the sitting place as the location of village social life, and that shift happened faster than any of the earlier ones.