A couple of decades ago, when more good people were leaving India Today magazine than joining it, Aroon Purie asked a departing colleague, who’d just given him the usual spiel you give while resigning, “If I’m the best boss around, why is everyone leaving?” Much the same question comes to mind while reading Connecting India — if BSNL and the Department of Telecommunications are indeed full of as many good people as the author will have us believe, how come the country’s top telecom PSU hasn’t made any profits from its operations in the last two-to-three years? Indeed, if you take the thousands of crore the PSU got by way of an Access-Deficit-Charge tax levied on rival telcos’ incoming calls, BSNL’s unprofitable years increase even more.
Of course, it is true you can have a combination of very good people and losses once you take into account the political and bureaucratic interference that is killing almost each and every PSU you can think of — which is why the UPA’s preference for disinvestment over privatisation is actually a calculated design to kill PSUs, only the Left (including the Leftists within the Congress party) doesn’t acknowledge it. The problem with SD Saxena’s loose and rambling narrative, however, is that he hardly stresses this in the manner you’d expect from a person who has spent 36 years of his life in public sector telecom. Instead of a crisp narrative on what Saxena himself says was one of the bigger triumphs in India’s industrial/corporate history — weaning away 3.5 lakh employees from government jobs and moving them to a public limited company, without even a single strike — and how it is being scuppered today, you get a series of instances which left a deep impression on Saxena.
This is not to say the book is not worth reading. It is, but you have to look for points to construct the narrative for yourself — and it is heart-warming, and instructive, even after all these years, to read about the bureaucrats/technocrats who did a wonderful job establishing BSNL; who, within less than two days of devastating cyclones/tsunamis, managed to restore telecom networks; and a lot more. The narrative of early years is a lovely read and tells you a lot about the manner in which PSUs function. Saxena’s account of how the formation of BSNL was hurried through, of how the accounts had to be outsourced (successfully, happily) in order to meet the deadlines, among a host of other stories, is revealing. The fact that he has so many stories of how his relationships with bank managers helped him get forex in time to send officers abroad or to import goods take you back to the bad old pre-liberalisation days and the mindless constraints under which business functioned. Indeed, one of the things about Sam Pitroda that impressed the author the most is how, under him, C-DoT managed to free itself from the tyranny of mindless government procedure on buying equipment — Saxena talks of how other government departments also asked it for help in procuring equipment at times.
Equally striking are the stories of how the progressive trade union leadership under OP Gupta allowed BSNL to function without a hitch and even accepted a lower pay-scale and emoluments for BSNL employees in comparison with the smaller MTNL; and of how, in one pithy line, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee ensured that the lakhs of government employees who were getting transferred to BSNL would continue to get their pension benefits [“to aap logon ko bhooka mar kar Corporation banayenge! (so we’re going to starve you to make BSNL!)]. The short point, in today’s surcharged atmosphere, is that you can’t build institutions without a healthy level of give-and-take.
Saxena alludes to the lowest-bidder-wins rule that is crippling PSUs — he says it is ironic that N Vittal who, as Chairman of the Telecom Commission, wanted to free PSUs ended up doing quite the opposite when, as Central Vigilance Commissioner, he came up with further restrictions on government/PSU tenders. Sadly, the examples Saxena chooses to talk of relate to an interior decorator and not to its procurement of critical equipment. Nor does Saxena dwell on the role of telecom minister A Raja in cutting its tender for cellular phone equipment by half, or of a disqualified bidder taking it to court and thereby ensuring it cannot move forward on its new tender. Both these instances effectively ensured BSNL did not have enough capacity to meet the increased demand for cellular mobile phones, and gradually lost market share to younger private sector rivals.
As for Saxena’s narrative on Sam Pitroda and C-DoT, it borders on hero worship, and he doesn’t even acknowledge the stories of equipment not working, or of not delivering on targets. Instead, he just says the organisation was killed by a group of narrow-minded people who didn’t want it to succeed. It’s not clear if that is a euphemism for saying existing equipment vendors wanted it shut down, but it’s fair to say the chapter on C-DoT doesn’t leave readers any wiser on the controversies over C-DoT’s performance.
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Connecting India: Indian Telecom Story
SD Saxena
Konark Publishers
183 pages; Rs 200