Death of an IT project

THE DEATH OF Sankhya Vahini, which is what the withdrawal of the U.S.-based IUNet implies whatever the Department of Telecom Services may claim about reviving it in another form, means that yet another opportunity to make good use of public sector assets has been lost. Sankhya Vahini was to be a joint venture between IUNet, the Department of Telecom and a few educational institutions that would have built on unutilised optical fibre capacity with the DoT/Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. to create a high- speed internet backbone in the country. This would have been available for educational and commercial purposes. The joint venture should have succeeded and added considerably to BSNL's profitability. But now it is just a question of time before the assets of BSNL gradually depreciate in value and they are snapped up for a song in a privatisation exercise. The range of criticism and the vociferousness with which it was made meant that few in the Government wanted to take the project through; no matter that the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, himself supported the proposal and Sankhya Vahini had been cleared by the Union Cabinet in 2000. This naturally left IUNet, which was promoted by Carnegie Mellon University of the U.S., no choice but to opt out from a project in a field where changes take place by the day.

In retrospect, almost all the criticism of Sankhya Vahini was unwarranted. The allegations that the presence of a foreign partner would have threatened national security by allowing tapping of phones have been dismissed by independent technologists and data experts as completely false. SV was to be a network for data and not voice traffic. The allegation that the Government had signed an MoU with IUNet in late 1998 even before it came into being was also incorrect since IUNet did, according to U.S. law, have the legal standing to enter into agreements at that time even if it was formally incorporated only in early 1999. The allegations that the DoT would have benefited more by auctioning off its dark fibre and that IUNet had no expertise in the area did not hold water since at that time there were no international firms suggesting an approach of an exclusive data network and Carnegie Mellon did have considerable expertise in information technology. The only criticism with some validity was that the Government task force which first mooted the joint venture on the suggestion of IUNet had bypassed the Telecom Commission; but this by itself did not warrant the storm of motivated criticism, which caused irreparable damage to the project before the allegations could be refuted.

An unusual aspect of the storm that ultimately felled Sankhya Vahini was that the attacks came as much from within the Government as from the political Opposition or moral allies such as the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. The Ministry of Information Technology, then headed by Mr. Pramod Mahajan, lost no opportunity to express its opposition while Mr. Ram Vilas Paswan at the Ministry of Communications supported Sankhya Vahini. The ultimate irony is that Mr. Mahajan, who now heads both Ministries, has spoken of going ahead with the project. Sankhya Vahini was conceived well before private plans were announced to lay cable across the country to profit from the expected demand for broadband connectivity. There was, therefore, always the strong suspicion that much of the criticism of Sankhya Vahini was fanned by commercial interests anxious about the joint venture acquiring first mover advantage in this field. As expected, after Sankhya Vahini was stalled a number of private ventures were indeed announced and some have made considerable progress. Those who opposed Sankhya Vahini on grounds of ``national interest'' will now have to ask themselves if they unwittingly or knowingly collaborated in the running down of public sector assets.

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