One might say it is a fall from grace for Congress leader Sam Pitroda given that he has been in news for wrong reasons many times. Then again, was the grace ever there to begin with? For starters, did you know that the Chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress, Sam Pitroda allegedly cost the country a whopping Rs 150 crore between 1984 to 1990 because of false promises? He was then the Chairman of the Telecom Commission and secretary of department of telecom.
Who is Sam Pitroda?
Sam Pitroda, short for Satyan Gangaram Pitroda, is the Chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress. He was born in Orissa’s Titilagarh in 1942. He moved to the US in 1964. He has been close to the Congress leadership since the time of Indira Gandhi.
He met the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1981 to discuss the development of telecom sector in India. In 1987, he became advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi, and launched six technology missions while serving as the Chairman of Telecom Commission and secretary of department of telecom.
Pitroda did not want to leave US to serve India
His loyalty to the Gandhi-Congress family continues ever since. In his own words, Pitroda has a “bond with Rahul Gandhi”. But loyalty to Gandhi-Congress is all that it has been over the years and his credits over telecom should not be mistaken as his love for the country itself.
In a report, Pitroda said that giving up his US citizenship to assume the role of Minister of State in the Rajiv Gandhi-led government was “a most painful decision”.
As per the report, Pitroda said, “The US has given me all the tools I need to do what I do.” Pitroda was asked by Rajiv Gandhi to become technology minister in his government.
Corruption allegations against Sam Pitroda
In 1984, Pitroda formed C-DoT under the Rajiv Gandhi government. It stands for Centre for Development of Telematics. In 1990, 6 years later, major allegations of financial irregularities surfaced.
It was alleged that C-DoT was used as a channel to further the interests of Sam Pitroda’s companies in the US, to recruit his preferred candidates to key positions, and of giving false progress reports about C-DoT.
Pitroda was accused of flouting government norms while importing equipment for the telecom project. Deals were struck between two fo his companies namely Martek and Micro Technology Inc and C-DoT clearing violating the rule the government servants cannot award contracts to their own companies.
Two of Pitroda’s close aides namely GB Meemansi, executive director of C-DoT, and DR Mahajan, director, C-DoT, were sacked by the government. At this time, the Nambiar Committee, set-up to asses C-DoT’s performance, had released its report.
The report was signed by 9 members. Meemansi and Mahajan had submitted a dissenting report. Moreover, the two aides of Pitroda were accused of having hand-picked the C-DoT staff so that they would not go against them.
What’s mind-blowing is that Sam Pitroda was at the heart of the very bureaucratic structure during his heydays which he would go on to criticise years later to form a narrative about his struggle to becoming the messiah of telecom in India.
Pitroda was the secretary of the department of telecom. As per government procedure, the Nambiar Committee report had to be examined by the Ministry of Communications before being tabled in the Parliament.
A report quoted a then senior telecom official as saying, “But how can Unnikrishnan allow Pitroda as secretary of the department to examine a report which is against him?”
Owing to this, the Minister of Communications, Unnikrishnan, could not table the Nambiar report in the Parliament. Although the report dismissed the charges of financial irregularities.
Pitroda was given special privileges by Congress govt
Moreover, reports point out that Pitroda enjoyed special power privilege unlike other secretaries. Pitroda was reportedly not bound by the services rules and he could not be removed from his position because he was appointed as Telecom Commission chairman by a cabinet resolution.
Interestingly, the terms and conditions of his appointment were not available in the government files. All that the government could do in order to hold him accountable was by filing a charge sheet.
As for the Nambiar report, it did criticise C-DoT for not being able to start the commercial production of 40,000 line exchange by 1987 as promised in 1984.
The note had even stated that C-DoT would develop an exchange with a capacity of 800,000 busy-hour call attempts, which was the number of calls an exchange could handle during peak hours at the time.
Instead, the report pointed, C-DoT had to begin work all over again in order to design the large electronic switching system. Forget the 40,000 and 800,000 line, even the 5,000-line exchange was not expected to be ready for commercial production before 1992-93.
The two and half year delay cost the Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) a revenue loss of Rs 150 crore. Pitroda’s close aides too accepted that C-DoT was behind schedule.
In the dissent report, it was admitted that C-DoT had still not developed many crucial components for the large exchange including the central module which connected different exchanges to each other and the input-output processor which stored billing information in the computer.
The organisation reduced the specifications for busy-hour call attempts from 2.8 lakhs in 1986 to 1.8 lakh in 1990 saying that “the country does not require such an exchange today”.
Pitroda had reportedly said that he had only promised to begin field trials by 1987 with the goal of commercial production, a fact which he reportedly claimed was misinterpreted.
Pitroda was accused of helping his friends get richer
Other suspicious activities included licensing more than 36 manufacturers to produce instrument which was not part of the mandate, below capacity work by C-DoT manufacturers, 11 foreign consultants appointed most of whom were close friends of Pitroda to help develop software.
A close friend of Pitroda from US, Roy Mehta, was paid Rs 41.64 lakh as a consultancy fee. Rs 1.29 crore were paid to foreign firms and individuals for consultancy.
The Telecom Commission did not take any action against French firm Alcatel despite the latter refusing to upgrade the technology it had supplied to India free of cost as per an agreement signed in 1982.
An agreement worth a staggering Rs 4 crore was signed by C-DoT with US-based Trans Tech for the development of cellular phones even though Pitroda himself had criticised the project as elitist.
Another report in the Economic and Political Weekly dated 1989 accused the telecom sector under the Rajiv Gandhi government as elitist.
Elitist nature of Sam Pitroda even when working with the Govt
An excerpt from the report reads, “The elitist orientation of the management of the telephone services was indeed embodied in the very charter of the Mahanagar Telephone Nigam. This is very much in tune with the overall development philosophy of the present establishment which, besides its many other features, has a marked weakness for spectacles and extravaganzas at selected points while the national scene as a whole remains drab and depressing.”
The report further reads, “Sam Pitroda himself is known to enjoy the confidence and support of the prime minister. His position as the prime minister’s technology advisor with the rank of minister of state has given him stature and clout in the ruling coterie. His appointment as secretary of the department of telecommunication by virtue of which he is also the chairman of the Telecommunications Commission is, however, protocol-wise rather odd.”
The report pointed out how Pitroda’s appointment to the rank of a minister while serving as a departmental secretary was an “unconventional arrangement”. Moreover, while Pitroda was appointing foreign manufacturers and consultants and furthering the interests of his companies, he was a strong opponent of importing telephone systems from diverse sources including Japan, France and Sweden.
Further on, the report states that Pitroda readily admits that he has little understanding of Indian society and is not even a serious student of the social and political forces at play in India.
