'I never used a telephone before going to America'

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With nearly 472 million mobile phone users at last count, it maybe hard to spot a public call office (PCO) anymore. But 25 years ago, this box with a phone that mushroomed all over the country, rang in sweeping changes in the way India connected with itself and the world.

The man who led that first telecom revolution, Sam Pitroda, is the prototype technocrat. He was till 2009 the Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission whose recommendations are shaping policy on education, the use of IT in governance, conservation of India's intellectual heritage and India's transformation into a knowledge society.

Pitroda continues what he calls his lifelong romance with nation building as an Advisor to the Prime Minister (PM).

Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview. Also watch the video.

Q: You are the prototype technocrat - 25 years after your engagement with nation building, using your expertise, your skills, your experience - do you see the glass as half full or half empty?

A: Glass is half full and it is half empty also. It depends on how you look at it.

Q: How do you look at it on most of the days?

A: The point is I don't look at this as a product. I look at this as a process. So the question of half full, half empty comes in only if you look if there is a product. Process is a continuum, glass gets more and more filled and it is never full and also never empty. So I look at this as a nation building process which takes generations.

Q: In the day of the mobile phone where every second person has a mobile phone and there is so much penetration even in the rural areas, that ubiquitous yellow PCO box is something that may not be as prominent especially in the cities, give us a sense of what it is, what was that mission that you came to implement?

A: I had never used telephone in my life before going to America because then we had very little telephone density. If someone had phone, he was too rich to be my friend and I was poor and we never had any telephone in fact in the entire village where I lived, we didn't have the telephone in those days. So when I went to US and started working on telecom I started seeing things very differently in terms of accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratization, decentralization and using telecom is a tool for nation building. While everyone else was designing telephone instrument, I constantly said to myself, to what use, how can you transform a society. So when I accomplished a few little things in the US, I felt this is the tool that I believe will transform India. Nobody believed it, I did not know how to do it but it was worth exploring.

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