As reported recently (CI No 1,388), the efforts of the Indian telecommunications development group C-DOT – Centre for Development of Telematics – to come up with a home-grown high capacity urban digital switch seemed to be doomed to failure with the advent of a new government considerably less sympathetic to the ambitions of C-DOT founder Sam Pitroda than former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was: now, in what is even more bad news for C-DOT, the Financial Times reports that the findings of a government committee leaked to an Indian business newspaper show that Pitroda had underestimated the complexity and magnitude of the task, and that the committee is now recommending that two 500,000 line a year factories should be set up to make exchanges based on Alcatel technology; on top of all this, the bedevilled Pitroda is now having to face up to accusations of financial malpractice by the new Minister of Telecommunications.
