A lawyer by profession, politician by accident, and a charmer by nature, India’s science minister finds developments in this field exciting and is convinced bio-tech is the next IT
Kapil Sibal arrives on schedule, dressed in his usual smile, below which there is a blue linen jacket and an open-collar denim shirt. The restaurant is thinly populated, and the chef comes up to greet him; it is clear that Sibal is a regular at the Taipan in Delhi’s Oberoi, which is his choice of venue for our lunch, writes T N Ninan.
He knows all the dishes, and asks for a lightly fried lotus dish for starters (excellent choice), black chicken and Chinese greens to go with steamed rice, and then water chestnut (another dish to be recommended), all of it to be washed down with Chinese tea.
We had agreed to meet after a brief conversation at a TV studio focused on what he had been able to do with his ministerial charge of science and technology — a subject that he had known nothing of, since he did history at St Stephen’s and then law. He had in fact written the IAS exam in 1972, got in, and then decided not to join. Three older brothers were already in service, but he decided to stick with his father’s law profession.
It was an uneventful career until he shot to fame when he mounted a defence in Parliament of the only judge who has been sought to be impeached. Among those who noted his stellar performance was PV Narasimha Rao.
Come the 1996 election, and RK Dhawan was to stand from South Delhi. Then the Jain hawala diaries happened, and suddenly the Congress had no candidate for South Delhi. That was when Sibal says he got a call from Rao, out of the blue, asking if he would stand. He demurred, was persuaded to fight, and lost by one lakh votes. Undeterred, he decided to fight again in 1998, and chose a constituency in Haryana. Meanwhile, he had been defending Lalu Prasad in the fodder scam (and thinks there is “no case” against him). Lalu called one day and offered Sibal a Rajya Sabha seat. He replied that he had already fixed on a Lok Sabha constituency, and in any case he would fight only on a Congress ticket. Lalu told him to file as a Congress nominee, the RJD would support him. That would give the Congress an extra seat in the Rajya Sabha, so Sibal went to Sonia Gandhi with the idea, which she endorsed.
Sibal was now in the Rajya Sabha, where he found himself amidst friends. “I had been the lawyer for many politicians, from Lalu to Jayalalithaa.” And, he adds, he has not taken payment from any of them, except that Jayalalithaa insisted on paying. May be this man knows how to collect IOUs.
Six years later, Sibal decided that if he was going to be in politics, he would have to do it the right way by facing the voter. He asked for and got Delhi’s Chandni Chowk (because it was a small, compact constituency) in 2004, and won with the largest margin in the constituency’s history. The constituency has now been expanded, following the delimitation exercise, but Sibal thinks he will win again, hands down. He says his voters come to him with all manner of requests, from school admissions (which he invariably manages to get, except when it is nursery school), to financial help. He runs an ambulance service, maintains a constituency office with 8-10 staff, and is getting a second water reservoir ready so that Chandni Chowk will have no water shortage. Power cuts have disappeared, following the privatisation of electricity distribution. And connectivity has improved vastly, with the metro service having come to Chandni Chowk. He would like to decongest the area by moving some of the markets in the crowded Walled City (like Chawri Bazaar’s paper market) to outlying areas. He likes the spirit of the place, the people are nice, and there is a sense of community.
He has mentioned neither reforms nor the rapid economic growth of the last five years as election issues, and he dismisses both thoughts with a shrug. Non-issues, he says. “Voters want to know what difference you can make to them.”
Does he miss law? No, politics is much more fun. He thinks he has been able to achieve an enormous amount as minister for science and technology, and rattles off an impressive list, including the sharp increase in patents obtained, and the improvement in the citation index as proof of better research being done in India. He is chuffed at the new policy that allows researchers and research bodies to get equity in companies that use their patents, and gives institutes the freedom to pay higher salaries. He stresses the breakthroughs coming up in many transgenic foods that hold tremendous potential for agriculture. He thinks bio-tech will prove to be a bigger story for India than IT, plans wholesale change in the functioning of the Met Department, and has got some major foreign collaborations for R&D work. Most of all, he is excited by geospatial technology, or GT — which he says can help governments and people solve problems in practically every sphere, be it accurately estimating crop size or the damage in a cyclone, or urban planning (mapping every building and road and sewer line, with 1:1000 resolution), sorting out land records, and much more.
He is doing a pilot project in his constituency, with high-resolution, long-distance cameras to map the area and track (for instance) whether anyone has done additional construction. He says Vasundhara Raje Scindia used GT to identify the precise spots where the Gujjars were agitating in Rajasthan. Ashok Gehlot has just been given a demonstration of what GT can do for the state, and (according to Sibal) gone back suitably excited. He regrets that neither the prime minister nor Sonia Gandhi has found the time to come to a presentation.
He would like to spend an astonishing Rs 70,000 crore on mapping the whole country, above ground, at ground level, and below ground — data which can then be used for any of thousands of applications by public and private sector. He dismisses the thought that techno-fixes like this do not work well when government departments themselves stick to their old ways, arguing simply that governments will have to change.
Asked what really goes on in Cabinet meetings, he says only a handful of ministers speak, the prime minister acts “as a good Cabinet Secretary” in the way he conducts meetings, and there is a collegial air — even ministers known to be articulate and with strong views state their position and then are willing to go with the consensus. Among the regular absentees at Cabinet meetings are Arjun Singh, who never speaks, and Mani Shankar Aiyar, who apparently comes only when his own subject is up for discussion.
So what ministry would he like, if the UPA comes back to power? He thinks for a moment: HRD, he says. Or external affairs. Even environment. Would he like to be the chief minister of Delhi? If Sheila Dikshit gives up the office after her third term, he would: “It would be a nice experience, to run a government after doing some ministries.”
We are done with talking. The chef comes to say good-bye. On the way out, one of the few diners at the restaurant rushes in before the lift doors close and then asks if it is going up or down. I tell him there is no ‘up’, this being the roof-top. Quick comes the repartee: “There is an upstairs, where we all have to go,” says Sibal. “But the lift won’t take you there.”
