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The TDP chief is mounting pressure on the Centre for his pet high-speed datalink project even though a House panel wants it reviewed

By Sumit Mitra 

A nationwide high-speed datalink is arguably an item in great demand when India is shifting gear to catch up with the information technology (IT) revolution. While the importance of greater bandwidth is not in doubt, it is odd if that becomes a prestige issue between the Union Government and a key partner in the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) of 27 parties.

It has become more than a prestige issue. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu's powerful pleading for Sankhya Vahini India Limited (SVIL) -- a proposed joint venture between the Government and IUNet, a subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburg, US -- has made many wonder if there could be any hidden political threat written into the bargain! Last week, Naidu wrote a stern letter to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, reminding him that the project hadn't been cleared three months after its Cabinet approval. The letter came at a time when pressure was mounting from Naidu's TDP to roll back several subsidy cuts proposed in the budget. As an NDA partner, the TDP has remained holier-than-thou by not participating in the Cabinet. If the TDP raises its eyebrows, the Government has palpitations. So the Government had a lot to be worried about by Naidu's letter.

It was not easy to oblige him, though. The Union Cabinet cleared the project in January. But it Minister Pramod Mahajan doubted from the beginning the manner in which the contract was awarded to IUNet, through a hurriedly-drafted MoU. Besides, a later inquiry showed that on the date of signing of the MoU, IUNet wasn't even incorporated as a company and was merely a name blocked at the Corporation Bureau of the Department of State of Pennsylvania. When India Today broke the story ("Giga Deal in Trouble", March 27, 2000), the file had reached the Law Ministry for vetting of the joint-venture agreement. And it got stuck there.

Now the project is up against a new obstacle as the parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications, chaired by veteran CPI(M) member Somnath Chatterjee, has blown the whistle on it. The 45-member committee has, in its unanimous report tabled last week, observed: "The committee is concerned to note that the Department of Telecom has decided to enter into a joint venture project with IUNet to set up Sankhya Vahini without undertaking any study about the technology available with the company and its competitors."

The committee comprises, besides Chatterjee, Congress veteran Pawan Kumar Bansal, matinee-idol-turned-parliamentarian Shatrughan Sinha, and Sangh Parivar ideologue Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the BJP, among others. Though no TDP member was a signatory to the report, it was a rare convergence of the extremes of the political rainbow, saying in unison "...it appears that a technology was selected amongst many similar technologies and a particular concern was chosen to be a partner without any evaluation of merits". The committee recommended "a full review of the matter" before the joint-venture agreement is inked.

That set the cat among the pigeons in Hyderabad. Naidu's letter to Vajpayee read: "Even three months after approval, the joint-venture agreement between IUNet and dot is yet to be signed, and other activities connected with the project do not seem to have taken off." Lok Sabha TDP leader K. Yerran Naidu, who confirmed that his party supremo had discussed the subject with Vajpayee "a number of times," alleged that the delay in the project's implementation had brought to a halt the state Government's village-level computerisation programme. "dot doesn't have the bandwidth, you know." When asked if non-implementation of the Sankhya Vahini project could precipitate a crisis at the Centre, Yerran Naidu retorted: "Crisis? What crisis? We're not blackmailing the Government. But we are friends, and if a friend makes a request, it should be honoured."

Chandrababu Naidu is the kingpin of the project, having pushed it at a meeting of the it Task Force in September 1998 over which he presided. It was drafted by two Indian scientists in CMU -- Raj Reddy and V.S. Arunachalam. Reddy, who co-chairs the US President's Advisory Committee on Information Technology and is the Herbert A. Simon University professor of Computer Science and Robotics at cmu's School of Computer Science, is a fervent champion of multi-gigabit networks, a technology which is still under incubation in the US. To Naidu, Reddy is a "local hero" who has made it big in the US computer folk-lore. Arunachalam, on the other hand, took premature retirement in the early '90s as scientific adviser to the Indian Defence Ministry, and is now a professor at the Robotics Institute of CMU.

The twosome sold through Naidu the idea of setting up the joint venture, with IUNet owning 49 per cent stake, for creating a 10,000-km fibre-optics network with enough bandwidth to pass data 100 to 1,000 times faster than the best of existing dot lines. The fibre was to be requisitioned from dot's existing 1,40,000-km-long fibre-optics backbone. Sankhya Vahini's votaries have often spoken about its application in the field of education, the data network covering the IITs. But that may be only the icing on the cake. Its commercial uniqueness indeed lies in its speed. At a maximum of 40 gigabits per second (GBPS), it can send every word in a library of one lakh books like a flash -- in one second flat. An expert in the it Ministry says that the network is a "potential techno-monopoly" which can dictate terms to all bandwidth users -- like Internet service providers, cable companies and software exporters. The question being asked now is: can such a monopoly right be bartered away for just 49 per cent share of the Rs 1,300-crore equity capital?

While Communications Minister Ramvilas Paswan said that the project would be "reviewed," the Telecom Commission, which met on April 19, set a date a fortnight later for its full scrutiny. The Commission may have to examine if CMU is the only organisation to possess the technology for high-speed data links.
The answer is a resounding no. In an e-mail reply to the question from India Today, Arunachalam paraded such CMU spinoffs as Fore Systems, an ATM maker, and Lycos, an Internet search engine, but had no ownership of data network to flash. However, high-speed networks are in their infancy all over the world and are everywhere under state control or supervision. China has a 10,000-km network built by Lucent Technologies, but the Chinese Government has kept the ownership under its thumb. In the US, the multi-gigabit networks are mostly sponsored by the US Department of Defense, with CMU as one of its many collaborative partners.

That touches the core of the security issue, which was first raised by the project's critics in the Sangh Parivar. Yerran Naidu calls it "the security bogey" and Arunachalam laughed it off. But policy planners in the capital think it is not a wise decision to put the Grand Trunk Road of India's data traffic within the guarding range of the army that remained tilted against India for most of the past 50 years.

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