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After
water comes communication |
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An Indian radical explains his
passion for bringing an impoverished population online to Supriya
Singh. Mr Tripuraneni
Hanuman Chowdary, 68, is fumbling at his email in Honolulu. "My 13
year old grandson kept telling me to practise," he says wryly as he
hands the mouse over to me. A short, alert man, he says, "He even gave
me a step by step list of what to do. But it takes too much time. My
three secretaries look after it for me." However, as Information
Technology Adviser to the State Government of Andhra Pradesh in India
since 1997, Chowdary has played a key role in the state’s
transformation into the second most important software development hub
in India. Five years ago Hyderabad’s claim to fame was the fading
legacy of Nawabs, the Salar Jung Museum and a grape industry. Now
Hyderabad is becoming Cyberabad with its own web site
www.andhrapradesh.com. Every week two Information Technology companies
get registered in Hyderabad. It has attracted the likes of Microsoft,
Oracle, IBM, Motorola, GE Capital, Lucent Technologies and Metamor.
Real estate prices in the vicinity of Cyberabad in the last three
years have risen from IR400 per sq. yd to IR10,000 per sq. yd. A
privately funded and managed university, the Indian Institute of
Information Technology has been set up with 60 per cent of its faculty
drawn from multinational IT companies. The chief minister N.
Chandrababu Naidu has headed a campaign that has seen 80 per cent of
government records computerised. He himself is known and feared for
his use of his laptop updated daily with information on every district
information system. Indian newspapers report the chief minister is
given to calling his officers at 6.30am saying, "This is Chandrababu
Naidu speaking." Since November 1999, these morning calls have been
supplemented by scheduled video conferences at the same time. These
early morning calls do not faze Mr Chowdary. By then he has already
done his one hour of physical exercise and 45 minutes of yoga and is
ready for his chief minister. Chowdary’s role in the transformation
of Andhra Pradesh continues his 22 year passion for ensuring that
every village in the state has a telephone. His achievements have
earned him the nickname, Telecom Hyderabad Chowdary. Chowdary comes
from a family of farmers – 25 acres under padi and pulses – in a small
village called Angaluru, 50 kms from Vijayawada, the third largest
city in the state. He is proud of his family history, for his
grandfather was a social reformer and a poet in Telegu and Sanskrit.
His statue in Hyderabad marks him as one of the 20 makers of modern
Andhra Pradesh. Chowdary himself became an engineer and the first
person in the family to work for the government.
Power of the
public phone
Mr Chowdary worked for the government however on his
own terms. When he was the general manager of telecommunications in
Andhra Pradesh, 1978 to 1983, the first thing he did was to move
public telephones from the post office to the village grocery
shop. "The post offices were open only for four hours and the phone
often did not work," he says. "I wanted a public telephone in every
village that worked all the time." So he moved the phone to the
information hub of the village, where there was an adequate supply of
young boys and girls to run messages. He wanted every irrigated
village to have a telephone, drawing from Hindu scriptures the dictum
that communication follows water. Every village that was part of the
state’s booming poultry industry also got a telephone, ensuring that
villagers were able to fix prices uniformly and not get fleeced by
persons in the middle. They were also able to telephone the relevant
authorities in case of power failure, for if the power failed for an
hour, the entire hatchery operations were destroyed. When Chowdary
found the government allocation of IR 100 million did not build enough
telephone exchanges in villages, he went to the villagers and said,
"Give me money, give me land, and I will build you an exchange."
Twenty villages gave him IR 50,000 (in those days equal to $US10,000)
so that they owned their exchange. It was money that was repayable by
the government over 20 years. Three hundred villages donated
land. The building was sometimes constructed with government money, and
sometimes with village money. "People would offer to build the walls,
make the frames. I would write on the building, ‘This land was donated
by so and so, and this building was donated by so." In full flow, he
pauses and says, "The money involved was not much. The villagers must
have pride that they are participating in development. They have to
say this is our building and not a government building." Everywhere he
involved the political representatives. In the villages, this sense
of belonging is particularly important, he says. "When there are
political disturbances, telephone exchanges are guarded by the police.
In the villages, who will guard them? But if the building belongs to
the village and the name of your grandfather is written there, the
family and the villagers protect them." He instigated a desire for
telecommunications by sending linesmen to villages to ask them to
apply for a public telephone, to explain the benefits of the phone.
"For every application, I gave my officials IR 10, taking it from the
IR 50,000 he was allowed to spend for things not specified
before." These unorthodox methods resulted in three attempts to
dismiss him. But each time they failed at the level of the
parliamentary inquiry, with the politicians hailing his activities. In
the five years Chowdary was in Andhra Pradesh, he had 2,000 public
telephones installed in villages every year. When he left Andhra
Pradesh in 1983 to take up his post as Deputy Director of the
Department of Telecommunications in New Delhi, he left a state where
35 per cent of the villages had a public telephone against an all
India average of seven per cent. By 1990, every village in the state had
a public telephone compared to the present figure of 60 per cent for
India.
Battling bureaucracy
His voice rises with passion,
his speech becomes faster than usual when he talks of the force
driving him for telecommunications reform. It is a mixture of pride in
India, pride in Hinduism. "I make no distinction between Andhra and
India," he says. "For me it is Bharat, Bharat, Bharat." An early
enthusiasm for communism was shattered partly by the failure of Indian
socialism. "A socialist government thought it knew best, that it alone
could implement change, that people cannot be trusted to know what is
good for them. It insectified the citizen." When in Delhi, he says he
was able to push an early initiative in 1981 of setting up telephone
booths to give people access to local and long distance calls. "Now
there are 850,000 public call booths in India, including 330,000 in
villages. I am proud of this. Fighting the bureaucracy took its toll
and there were times when he wanted to give up. "My wife," he says,
"is a noble soul. Every time I would say I want to give up, she would
say ‘Give up? Give up? Why should you give up?’ Their wages do not
matter. You can earn more outside.’" As an after note he says, his
wife thinks he is a "bogus engineer, for I can’t fix anything in the
house." So he continued his public activities. His campaign to end the
telecommunications monopoly in India had to be done covertly through
political leaders of all persuasion when he was a government servant.
But on his retirement in November 1989 as Founding Chairman and
Managing Director of Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), the Indian
Overseas Telecommunications Corporation, he was free to publicise his
views and lobby politicians. He set up the Center for Telecom
Management and Studies in Hyderabad with support from 150 companies at
IR 5,000 a piece. He is a fellow of Tata Consultancy Services and of
Satyam Computer Services, the second largest software company in India
and the country’s first private ISP. In return they give him office
and secretarial support for he says as soon as he accepts money from a
private company, he loses his public role. He continues to write at
least one article a day which gets published in one of 14 publications
– national newspapers, Telugu weeklies and his centre’s monthly
journal. Through these different channels he rails against the
Department of Telecommunications, argues for the removal of Ministers
of Communication that fall short, and pushes his agenda on
liberalisation and competition. Going back to his fumbling email, he
says, "I don’t want to waste time typing. I dictate at 110 words a
minute. I have three secretaries in three offices and a grandson to
help me." Chowdary’s record as a public advocate for liberalisation for
telecommunications in India and an increase in services to villages
made the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, N.T. Rama Rao, seek him out
to chair the Andra Pradesh Electronic Development Corporation in 1990.
This role did not last long because soon after Rama Rao lost in the
state elections. When Rama Rao did come back to office, Chowdary
together with many others withdrew support from him. Rama Rao is
said to have instigated the divorce of a young woman who had come to
write his autobiography. He subsequently married her. Chowdary says,
he feared that as in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, an old man’s folly
would ruin the state. In September 1995, Chandrababu Naidu, 50,
deposed his father-in-law and took over as Chief Minister. Naidu
inherited a backward state with no money to pay the civil servants.
Chowdary says, "He stumbled, but then he started hearing about IT from
various sources, including me. Somehow he got convinced that IT –
applied everywhere – will lead to better government. He asked me to be
his IT advisor."
The vision for Cyberabad
The first
thing Chowdary was involved in was the IT vision 2020, inspired by
Malaysian and Singapore plans. The Chief Minister made himself
accessible to telecommunication and IT companies. By 1997, they had
the vision of Hyderabad becoming Cyberabad. In this transformation,
Chowdary says the Chief Minister is the salesman. ‘What do you want?’
he asks the companies and then gives it. They built a 500,000 sq feet
cyber tower, creating space for companies to plug and play, while they
built their own buildings. In the first phase, 158 acres were
earmarked for Cyberabad. It is now 93 per cent occupied and a second
building is planned. Chowdary admits that the danger is that the
state could fall victim to its own hype. It is believed that only 10
per cent of the state’s government officers are computer literate.
Hence the push is coming mainly from the top, with orders being issued
at the bottom, but not necessarily being implemented. "Of course,"
Chowdary says, "we are hyping too much. But if we don’t hype we cannot
catch the imagination of people. If you don’t hype it doesn’t
happen." It is the cultural change that is going to be difficult to
achieve. But the media is a powerful ally. District Magistrates,
municipal councillors, Members of the Legislative Assembly from the
chief minister’s Telegu Desam party are required to appear regularly
on local cable TV, where they take telephone calls from all over the
state. The Chief Minister himself appears every Monday on TV and radio
from 6pm to 7pm. Fears that the chief minister had taken on too many
vested interests to survive at the polls were put to rest by his
victory in the 1999 elections. "This is despite the fact that the
incumbent is always defeated," says Chowdary. He is obviously an
enthusiast and campaigned for him openly through his centre’s journal.
Chowdary sees the chief minister as being able to implement the
philosophy he himself has espoused in telecommunications, to listen to
and empower the citizens. Chowdary says the chief minister’s philosophy
"is that the moment a citizen is required to come to a government
office, that is the beginning of corruption. Let him (sic) do
everything he (sic) wants with the government from a kiosk on an
information network." Hence the proliferation of 1000 Internet booths
in Hyderabad and another 1200 in villages in the state. Andhra
Pradesh’s record in telecommunications and IT is within the context of
increasing expertise in IT and the liberalisation in
telecommunications in India. The country produces 200,000 IT
professional a year. Competition in telecommunications has slowly and
haltingly been introduced in local and mobile telephony. There are 125
licensed Internet Service Providers, with 50 already operating. There
are 600,000 Internet registered account holders though the number of
Internet users is closer to one million. There are some 30,000
Internet booths in India. Chowdary warms to his favourite topic that
in India people must have access to the latest IT and Internet booths
or tele-cottages are the way. In a country with a per capita annual
income of US$300, and a continuing burden of great illiteracy, it is
inconceivable to provide every household can have a telephone and a
PC at home. At these tele-cottages or Internet booths, a person can
get help and have his or her own email or voice mail box. Chowdary
says by the end of February 2000, all the 500 district centres in
India will have a Department of Telecommunications Internet node. So
any Internet call in India will be a local call. But that is where the
problem lies, for local calls are timed at IR 1.25 for every three
minutes, working out to IR25 an hour. This is in addition to the
Internet access fee which at its lowest is IR 11 an hour. So his
next campaign is to have untimed Internet calls. He says pointedly
that the dominant party of Andhra Pradesh has political clout at the
national level with 27 members of parliament. What about Internet
telephony? This gets him going in full flow against the
shortsightedness of the continued monopoly of VSNL over long distance
calls in India. "Internet Telephony will only happen when the DOT
(Department of Telecommunications) is dead," he
says.
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