Arunachalam speaks II

Something fishy...

George Iype

It was not long after he was anointed the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that Kuppahalli Sitaramayya Sudarshan went over to meet Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at his 7, Race Course Road residence.

At the end of his 45-minutes long meeting, the new RSS chief put forward one vehement demand: scrap the Sankhya Vahini project.

And soon pressure mounted on Vajpayee to dump the super-speed data network joint venture project that the government of India has conceived in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University.

This won't be an easy decision for the prime minister to take. The multi-million dollar project promises to lay the foundation of a technologically-sound high-bandwidth data backbone in India. But he faces opposition from a powerful political campaign, including his party colleagues, RSS mandarins as well as the opposition parties.

Trying to shove along a reluctant PM is Dattopant B Thengadi, a known Vajpayee basher and founder of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the RSS's trade union outfit. Thengadi has come out with thousands of pamphlets that claim Sankhya Vahini is questionable, unaccountable, even scandalous.

The central cabinet too is divided on the project's credibility and viability. Minister for Information Technology Pramod Mahajan is clearly averse to the project though Minister for Human Resource Development Murli Manohar Joshi and Minister for External Affairs Jaswant Singh are all for it. Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran thinks it's a good idea, but Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha has expressed his dissatisfaction with it.

"It is perhaps the worst instance of India allowing a foreign partner to loot the country's rich potential in the information technology," says Thengadi. "There is nothing swadeshi in the project except for its Sanskritised name. Isn't it ridiculous that we are allowing our infrastructure to be used by a foreign company to siphon off profits," he asked.

The infrastructure Thengadi means is the Department of Telecom's 10,000-route kilometer fiber-optic backbone. The foreign partner that Thengadi accuses is the International University Network (IUNet), a company incorporated by Carnegie Mellon University to disseminate knowledge throughout the world. IUNet claims to bring to the desktop decades of research and the experience of Carnegie Mellon University.

Officials at the newly-formed ministry of information technology who are now re-examining Sankhya Vahini say there is indeed something fishy about the process in which a lone bidder was chosen for the high-tech data project.

Sankhya Vahini was first mooted six years ago, when two famous Indian scientific brains at CMU -- Dr Raj Reddy and Dr V S Arunachalam -- made presentations to the Indian government about a high bandwidth project for educational purposes in the country.

The first presentation was made to Congress Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao in 1994. Subsequently, in mid-1997, the Telecom Commission learnt of it. But it was only after Vajpayee formed a coalition government with the Telugu Desam Party as a major partner in 1998 that momentum really picked up.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu was in the right place and had the right kind of reputation to push the thing ahead. With his largest group of MPs, Naidu was the BJP-led coalition's spinal cord and Vajpayee depended on him for his government's survival.

Vajpayee then set up an Information Technology Task Force headed by Jaswant Singh, then vice-chairman of the Planning Commission. Naidu was appointed vice-chairman. And Dr Reddy and Dr Arunachalam were back, making their presentations to an expert committee that included members of the Task Force, Minister for Communications Sushma Swaraj, and the chairman and members of the Telecom Commission.

The CMU duo called for the creation of a separate fiber optic data network, separate from the telephone system, This, they said, could transmit educational and informational content to millions of users in India. Due to the economies of scale, larger bandwidths would be available at lower cost than today. India urgently requires such technology to train the large number of IT professionals needed in the coming years and to spread the IT revolution, they said.

Dr Reddy and Dr Arunachalam said CMU could help lay the foundation for such a dedicated high-bandwidth data backbone, Dr Reddy and Dr Arunachalam said that CMU could bring in optical equipment and software to make the DoT's existing 10,000-kilometer much faster, providing a bandwidth of 40 gigabytes per second.

To begin with, they said Sankhya Vahini would connect at least 10 metropolitan cities and over 100 universities, institutions of higher learning and research centers. This would create a national Internet backbone by freeing a few fibers exclusively for this program from the existing Department of Telecommunications network. It will also set up a series of Urban Data Networks linked to the national Internet backbone..

The IT Task Force and the government's telecom experts were convinced. Soon after the presentation, on October 16, 1998, a memorandum of understanding was signed between IUNet and the Department of Telecom. The cabinet approved it on January 19, 1999.

As per the MoU, the government of India owned 51 per cent stake while IUNet held 49 per cent equity in the joint venture. The government then broke up the Sankhya Vahini equity between different departments. Thus, the department of telecom services, part of the communications ministry and the DoT, now holds 45 per cent, the ministry of information technology holds two per cent and the human resource development ministry has four per cent stake in the project.

Thus was born Sankhya Vahini, the next generation data network that would bring to India for the first time, state-of-the-art technologies such as dense wavelength division multiplexing and wide-area Gigabit Ethernet. And the project cost was pegged at Rs 10 billion.

Soon, the Sankhya Vahini India Limited was floated and the new company began seeking property to set up its headquarters. The government wanted it to be in Delhi, but Naidu insisted that it should be set up in Hyderabad.

These were minor matters and things appeared to be going smoothly for Sankhya Vahini. At least till the re-elected Vajpayee government formed a ministry of information technology. This, exactly one year after the project was inked.

The new minister, Pramod Mahajan, is known to be Vajpayee's right hand man, but it was he who launched an investigation into the project through Secretary P V Jayakrishnan.

Jayakrishnan's findings said the Sankhya Vahini has flouted all telecom norms and regulations and that it was pushed through without any competitive bids from any other private company.

It said Dr Reddy and Dr Arunachalam had begun negotiating with the Indian government for the project's sanction when IUNet was not even registered as a company with the United States government's state department.

And that set the cat loose among the pigeons...

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Design: Rajesh Karkera

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