By Elizabeth Pisani

NEW DELHI, AUG. 4, REUTER — Telecommunications, literacy, water, oilseeds, immunization a litany of issues crucial to India’s development are files on the desk of a man determined to modernize this lumbering nation.

Sam Pitroda, special adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, deals with ‘technology missions’ projects aimed at getting India to stand on its own feet.

“People say I spread myself too thin,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s all about the same thing, it’s all about realizing technology is the way forward for India.”

Pitroda began his career as an engineer at the U.S. Telecommunication Company General Telephone and Electronics, and then set up a series of companies that made him a millionaire.

“It’s easy for me, I don’t have to worry about money, I get all kinds of support from my wife and two wonderful kids.”

Pitroda, native of India’s western state of Gujarat, returned from Chicago in 1986 at Gandhi’s instigation to help modernising his homeland.

“My kids, they liked the states, the Mercedes, the seven bedroom house. They couldn’t understand why we came back,” he grinned, running his fingers through his long silver hair.

“Now they just think ‘Oh well, daddy’s a little weird,’ and leave it at that.”

His own attitude is less resigned. “I came back because I saw this vacuum, this need to motivate the young, to explain what technology is all about,” he said.

The 45yearold Pitroda says India has a misconception of the role of technology. “It’s not about toys and tinkering. It’s a starting point for all social transformation.”

“The village head uses a stick to find water. Of course, it quivers in his back yard, and that’s where the well goes.”

But the hereditary caste system which grips rural India prevents low caste villagers from drawing water in the garden of a high caste Hindu, he said.

“Now we go in with maps and computer projections and pinpoint the best water supply. Bang we get an efficient well: which everyone can use, and we deal a blow to vested interests.

“And after all, the resistance is all here,” he said, tapping his forehead with a ringed finger.

Pitroda sees resistance in any change threatening the supremacy of high caste Brahmins manifested in the Indian attitude to science.

“There’s Brahmin science and then there’s (low caste) Sudra science. The Brahmin science is international conferences, luxury hotels, talk, talk, talk. People like that.”

“What we need is more sudra science. It’s broken? Take a screwdriver. Fix it. In India people still find that demeaning.”

He described India’s young guard as capable and aggressive. “But we’ve got to pin them down before they get sucked in by a system that orders rather than empowers.”

His approach is very UN Indian, a western diplomat said.

“It would perhaps be more sensible, and certainly more typically Indian, if Pitroda compromised if he allowed the old guard to dole out one or two contracts for imported technology.

“You have to realize this man is depriving these people of an income. They live on the kickbacks they get from foreign contractors,” a USS. Diplomat said.

“But Pitroda is not interested in all that. He wants to break the mould.”

How to do that? Pitroda tries to instill a work ethic that he sees as totally absent in India. He is one of the few men in New Delhi who can be reached in the office at 8 a.m.

Despite being well informed on a large range of topics, Pitroda claims his asset is his ignorance.

Article extracted from this publication >> August 12, 1988