Sankhya Vahini Death of an Embryo...

On 17 October 2001, Shyamal Ghosh, chairman, Telecom

Commission, government of India, received a fax. It said that IUNet Board and

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) were pulling out of the Rs 1,000-crore ‘Sankhya

Vahini’ project. The news didn’t generate any shockwave in telecom echelons.

Why?

Sankhya Vahini: The Genesis

The project first came up in 1994, when two famous Indian

scientists at CMU–Dr Raj Reddy and Dr VS Arunachalam–made a presentation to

the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao about a high-bandwidth project for

educational purposes in the country. In March 1998, when the BJP-led NDA came to

power, the project was pushed, among others, by N Chandrababu Naidu, the chief

minister of Andhra Pradesh and the co-chairman of the Task Force. On 5 September

1998, Arunachalam and Reddy made another presentation to the IT Task Force. On

16 October 1998, DoT signed an MoU with the US-based IUNet, a company

incorporated by CMU. According to it, GoI owned 51 percent stake while IUNet

held 49 percent equity in the joint venture–Sankhya Vahini India Ltd.

Opening Pandora’s Box

Protests came in thick and fast, first from within MIT.

Senior MIT officials felt that the government had waived all rules and

regulations, including the Indian Telegraph Act 1885, the Indian Wireless Act

1933, the National Telecom Policy 1994 and the NTP 1999, while allowing duty

free import of equipment under the project.

But the real hue and cry came from political quarters.

"How come BJP forgot all about its ‘swadeshi’ policy?" asked

Niloptal Basu, MP, CPI-M. RSS too found it ridiculous for a foreign partner to

control the JV, and alleged that the project was a sound platform for the US to

intercept India’s strategic and scientific secrets. Congress, the main

opposition party, accused the government of clearing the project in undue haste.

It was also said that the foreign partner was not bringing any investment into

the country.

While the MoU did not mention in clear terms who would make

purchase of high-end equipment for the project, IUNet claimed that it would be

their responsibility. This was strongly objected to by Telecom Equipment

Manufacturers Association on grounds that the US-based company would neglect the

Indian companies while placing orders for the equipment.

After the BJP-led alliance was back in power in 1999, Pramod

Mahajan, the new minister for IT, asked PV Jayakrishnan, secretary, MIT, to

investigate the matter. Besides finding most of the allegations true,

Jayakrishnan’s probe reveled that IUNet was registered as a company by the CMU

only after the MoU was signed.

Sources say that the Cabinet’s approval of the project in

January 2000 was probably due to the fact that Vajpayee didn’t want to annoy

Telugu Desam supremo Naidu. But mounting RSS pressure proved too much for

Vajpayee and his office to ignore. Bureaucratic delay tactics was seen as way

out of the quagmire. Mahajan, while admitting that the ‘delay’ did

contribute to the project falling through, said it was still very much a paper

project.

Two days after the IUNet-CMU pull out, Mahajan announced that

the government was already working on an alternative Education and Research

Network scheme for universities. Another project, Vidya Vahini, is also on. The

project would provide Internet connectivity to 60,000 secondary schools in the

country.

Shubhendu Parth in

New Delhi