The Telecom Quartet
Folio III Magnifera
Indica – the magnificient
History surrounds us
Two Thousand years ago, Greeks came
to
The History of Indian Telecom
Professionals has largely remained an unsung story barring a few documentaries.
I have the good fortune of communicating with Dr. CNN Nair who did a
magnificent job of writing VSNL‘s (India‘s erstwhile state monopoly in
International Telecommunication and is more than 127 year old Company) history
in two volumes entitled Back to the Dots.
Dots are of dots and dashes of Morse
code and his work, other than
being a dry narrative has that welcome effect of letting you know
human beings, their stories, their aspirations and the way they looked at their
profession. It was a lucky coincidence that Dr. Nair had literary flair and he
deserves a great thanksgiving from all of our profession for doing a very great
job indeed.
It is really unfortunate for us that
we never took history seriously. We could never understand this fact, in spite
of immense suffering as a community that history is not what was but is the
closest approximation of a theory to understand what we could be. A person, a
family, a group of professionals, a nation will not be confident if it has only
a vague, memory-strained and hazy idea about its past. I am not aware whether
there is any comprehensive history written on Indian Telecom. However, while
commissioning a writer for our history, we need to be clear that he has to be
of exceptional calibre, both as a historian and narrative-artist. I find that
Dr. Nair would have been a very good resource to undertake the job of writing
the history of Indian Telecom Professionals.
In short, Indian Telecom Engineers
have served the nation and their profession well for more than one hundred and
fifty years. They have braved the Himalayan snow (e.g. Srinagar Troposphere
scatter station where worked my colleague Mr. Subhas Chand as a young recruit) to the deep oceans (laying
undersea fibre and I happen to have been in few such expeditions); the deep
forests of North East to the burning sand of Western Indian desert, our
colleagues have made the dream of connection possible. As a young recruit, I
was charmed by the stories told by the veterans of Dehradun (UP – northern
Indian Tarai ) and Arvi (near Pune – Western part of Sayahdri range) when they had to fight for existence with Tigers
and Cobras. I learnt of stories of courage, determination and human frailties.
These men, when they joined the organization was a bunch of boys but the experience made them men, a band of
brothers and the friendship which stayed a life-time. It will be difficult to
convince our children who would grow up with Broadband Internet of the
achievement that was while beaming an international call for the first time
from a satellite earth station was a matter of great achievement!
The Unbearable
Nineties in
In 1985, Infosys was born. In the
same year VSNL was corporatised. By 2000,
Recently, I had the opportunity of
reading a paper by Ms. Paula Chakrabartty, styled as a post-modern critic on
Indian Telecom Reform from a Cultural Perspective. It was instructive to the extent of making it
possible that Telecom Industry has undergone an inversion in terms of priority. While in
late eighties, it was a luxury, by mid nineties anyone holding such view will
be a considered development heretic. If you listen calmly, you will hear our
achievements as silence because people have been so accustomed with it.
There are few who mourn at the loss
of state monopoly and in this trend of privatization and globalization they
find ominous signs which I leave for you to decode. The debate of development
priority is at the heart of Indian Reform and has more than one dimension. But
the fact, which is undisputable, is that Indian Telecom professionals were the
lowest paid during state monopolies and the best among them served the country and
profession well. They deserve our thanks where it is due. Without them, we
would not have been here.
I started in an optimistic tone. I
plan to keep it that way. While I write this from a separation of thousand
miles from VSNL and
Twelve years hence that time, being
a new recruit of VSNL at Pune still smelling the old smell of the Raj (we were
given bed-tea, brought by a young man in bicycle) and started an affair. In one
of the starry nights of Malabar in 1998, a group of VSNL men stood standstill
as the antenna above beamed a carrier (the first international carrier from the
soil of Malabar) to the Arabian heartland and someone spoke over the phone. It
was a simple call but for all of us, it is a part of personal history. In
hindsight, we now know well that it was part of Indian Telecom History as well.
Indian Telecom has confidently
embraced the spirit of Contemporary Times – of liberalization and global
outlook in terms of business and customer. Telecom now does not evoke the
picture of wire and black hand-sets but it is part of fashion statement as
mobile phones and their design constantly remind us. For the first time, Indian
private sector has been a partner in the sector. We have old and respected houses
like Tata in one side and young and promising Bharti
in another. We have Birla as well as Reliance. In the wake of more foreign
investment, we are expected to see lots of collaboration and global tie-ups.The
biggest question for Indian Telecom is not development any more, it is the
question of long term sustainability and creative thinking. It will be a height
of madness for the private players to dismiss the tradition of the past as in-efficiency of monopoly and
state-control. On another side, the tradition
of monopoly, should not give a pre-matured judgment on the young sector.
Leaving the extremes, we need a synergy between these two sectors because both
are going to fight it out in global markets.
If anecdotal evidence has anything
to do with deeper and more profound issues of a process, then my experience
tells me a trend which is clear as far as skill-inventory of Communication
Engineers is concerned. Internet and IP network, due to its open standards bring
down the market-value of those professionals who have been trained almost a lifetime
in proprietary systems and standards. Due to cheap bandwidth prices, Telecom
Outsourcing will be a very significant driver of the industry and that would
make lots of skill of communication engineers either redundant or of high-cost.
Companies would not be able to evade the unpleasant decisions for long as
Competition will be fierce, both in terms of embracing new technologies as well
as the dimension to Cost. It is
important for Policy makers as well as leaders of industry to think on these
issues. Unlike the banking sector which also experienced this quite sometime
back, the pace by which these changes will be manifesting in telecom quite an
order faster.
Ancient Civilizations – Contemporary Concerns
For a Call to Future, please read on
the Concluding Part Hello,
Hello, Good Morning Future !