With a new government now in power, the race is back on for the lion’s share of India’s multibillion dollar telecommunications market, and whether it will be won by predatory outsiders or by India’s own Centre for the Development of Telematics, C-DOT, seems to depend on whether the Indians can come up with their proposed 40,000-line modular urban exchange in time – something that the multinationals are convinced they cannot do, reports the Financial Times. One of the more colourful figures in the battle is C-DOT head Sam Pitroda, who, after receiving training as an electronics engineer in the US, returned to India, and apart from pioneering the use of microelectronics in that country, also embodies the intensely-felt Indian desire for self-sufficiency. Pitroda and the C-DOT team are in the process of designing the 40,000-line exchange on which the Indian economic nationalists are relying to stave off the approaches of Alcatel, Ericsson, Siemens, AT&T, British Telecom and the like. The 16,000-port C-DOT system is modular in design, comprising sets of low capacity private branch exchanges and small rural exchanges and because the technology is the same throughout, it should in principal be infinitely expandable: it is precisely this modular concept that exercises C-DOT’s rivals – mainly because they themselves have never got anywhere with it. Back in May, with the support of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi behind him, Pitroda was able to assert that India could do without foreign collaboration to develop its main urban exchanges, insisting the C-DOT system would be ready in time to solve the bottlenecks already mounting up on the country’s overcrowded network.

Political influence

But since the defeat of Congress in the election, Pitroda’s political influence has declined, and the new Minister for Communications, a certain K P Unnikrishnan, has commissioned a report on the delays that have plagued the C-DOT exchange, and to determine whether C-DOT is capable of coming up with the goods in time at all. The Indian government is committed to having another 15m lines installed by the end of the century, but India’s only plant for manufacturing digital exchanges, in Mankapur, has a capacity of only 500,000 lines a year of Alcatel NV’s E10; added to that, C-DOT’s 1,500-line 512-port exchange, which C-DOT says is ready to go into production, is suspected of software problems, while the prototype of the 40,000 line exchange set up in Bangalore has for the moment a capacity of only 3,000 lines. Pitroda is adamant that this will increase to 20,000 when commercial production starts in a few months time, and will be up to 40,000 by the end of the year. If this does not come to fruition, and if it turns out that India does not have the manufacturing capacity to support its ambitious 10-year plan, there is no doubt that Unnikrishnan will push the case for outsiders coming in. But the new Minister for Communications is by no means typical of the rest of his colleagues in government, whose concern over India’s balance of payments and national pride will make Pitroda’s system appear infinitely preferable especially since, at UKP360 a line, it is less than half the cost of the Alcatel exchange. Sam Pitroda, on the other hand, seems to have been mellowed somewhat by the events of the last nine months, and although he is still fully confident that C-DOT’s 40,000-liner will do the job, now concedes that a door might be open for an Alcatel or an Ericsson to offer larger ones for the main cities. – Mark John