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: A 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
the Telgu Desam supremo, Naidu. But the 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 that 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,
Dataquest