Extraordinary memoir

Dreaming Big by Sam Pitroda with David Chanoff ; penguin; Price: Rs.699; Pages: 331 Within a society given to worshipping at the altars of political, business and even cinema dynasties, it’s unsurprising that Dreaming Big: My Journey to Connect India, the autobiography of Satyen (‘Sam’) Pitroda, the US-based self-made millionaire who catalysed post-independence India’s cruelly-delayed telecom revolution, has received few and lukewarm reviews. Yet this memoir is an inspirational narrative of a visionary engineer of modest circumstances who slummed it out in America as a student, and in typical American style transformed into a dollar millionaire. However the differentiating characteristic of Sam Pitroda is that he responded to the call of the illiterate masses of his country, and returned home to kick-start the critical telecom industry. Pitroda’s uplifting story details how the son of a blacksmith took full advantage of his modest education in a boarding school (Sharada Mandir, Vidyanagar, Gujarat), and engineering education at Baroda’s M.S. University, and financed his Masters degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. In 1964, Pitroda who had never made a telephone call until then, set sail for America. The trials and tribulations he faced as an impecunious student at the original IIT, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart from Baroda, and how, triumphing over adversity, he landed his first job in the land of opportunity, quickly building a reputation as an expert in the fast growing telecom switching systems sector, is optimally covered in Part I of this engaging memoir. In 1980, Pitroda made his first passage to India after his emigration. At the time when the country’s population was nearing 1 billion, the entire economy was served by a mere 2.5 million telephone connections. Typically, there is no record of which worthy made the decision to deny the lay citizenry this basic service which undoubtedly cost the Indian economy hundreds of millions by way of lost development and business opportunities. But it’s a measure of the stupidity of the recently abolished Central Planning Commission and its clerical economists that within two decades after liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, the number of cellular phones countrywide is estimated at over 900 million. I believe that improved connectivity has added at least 2 percentage points per annum to India’s GDP during the past decade. Inevitably Pitroda’s determination to upgrade and modernise the crucial telecom sector wasn’t well-received by the country’s notoriously obstructive bureaucracy. It took him many journeys between the US and India before he was given an hour by prime minister Indira Gandhi — on the urging of her son Rajiv — to present a proposal to build small 128-256 line, “ruggedized” rural automatic exchanges (RAX) which would connect rural with urban India. Three years later in 1984 the Union cabinet approved the establishment of C-DOT (Centre for Development of Telematics) with a budget of $36 million (then Rs.108 crore). Overturning conventional wisdom which focused on density of telephones in cities which would spill over into rural areas, C-Dot exchanges…