How Telecom Changed Indian IT Forever

He

built the foundation for India’s telephony usage revolution in the last two

decades of the twentieth century. In the Dataquest awards event in December,

Panel chairman Pramod Mahajan, who presented him the Dataquest Lifetime

Achievement Award 2002, called Sam Pitroda the father of Indian Telecom.

His vision, and his team’s technology, helped connect people in India’s

cities, towns and remote villages, to each other and to the world. His fought

for his conviction that the phone had as big a role as roti, kapda aur makan. He

had a different answer to the tele-density problem: provide access. The

resulting network of manned phone booths and cheap exchanges transformed the

landscape to one of the world’s most successful examples of technology

adaptation for the masses. Those booths, which employ a million people, are the

base for tech-enabled services tomorrow, including mail and Internet access. And

the RBI has now said that over 20,000 of them can become delivery points for

banking services.

And the Dataquest Man of the Year 2002 is the new face of Indian telecom, the

man driving its 21st-century revolution, with Connectivity, Convergence–and

Competition. Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Group, which Mahajan called India’s only

real private telecom success story so far, has begun to change the landscape

forever. He made long-distance telephony affordable, pushing down sky-high

tariffs, and set the benchmarks for cellular and now basic telephony.

Never before has someone from the telecom world been a Dataquest IT Man of

the Year. Nor an IT Lifetime Achievement awardee been a telecom man. Even the

Pathbreaker Awardee, Raman Roy, is a player outside the immediate IT world. He

helped create a new industry, founding BPO operations at Amex and GE,

positioning India firmly on the IT-enabled services map, and showing us the

possible employment and revenue potential, when infrastructure ramps up even a

bit.

Why did ten eminent panelists from IT choose to recognize three

"non-IT" figures for India top IT achievement and contribution awards

of the year?

Because their work has had great impact on Indian infotech, and this impact

will increase in the years ahead.

They have laid a foundation for an IT-enabled and connected India. Without

those networks, access points and telecom ‘exposure’, there would be no IT

for the people.

Those C-DoT switches and PCOs are the backbone for services, e-governance and

citizen information interchange, and the access points for the millions who can

buy neither PC nor phone.

And with a 1/100 PC density in a billion-strong population,

"access," again, is the likely answer. Most information will be

flowing through community access points like cybercafes, rather than home PCs.

Clearly, convergence is here to stay.

Prasanto K Roy