The man who brought Internet to India

Vijay C Roy

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There are more than 550 million (55 crore) Indians connected to the Internet today, that is more than 40 per cent of the population. This number also makes India the world’s second largest online market, ranked only after China.

Further, India’s IT industry was worth $181 billion in 2018-19. Its exports were valued at $137 billion. The IT industry would have bloomed late, if at all, without Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd’s (VSNL) high-speed data services connecting Indian software engineers with their clients and sites all over the world.

Interestingly, VSNL (later privatised and renamed Tata Communications) introduced Internet services two and half decades ago in 1995 when even China did not have the net. A Chinese minister visited the VSNL in 1996 to learn the tricks of the trade. Have you ever wondered how Internet came to India and who was the man behind the transition?

The answer is Brijendra K Syngal, the man behind telecom revolution who was appointed CMD, VSNL, in 1991. He is widely regarded as the “Father of Internet” and the one who connected the country to the rest of the world in the early years of globalisation and bridged the digital divide. Telecom Man by Brijendra K Syngal and Sandipan Deb is the story of the father of Internet in India — and a riveting and inspiring chronicle of change.

The book is a personal account of Brijendra K Syngal, who was at the helm of affairs at VSNL, and how the telecom revolution came to India, right from the grassroots to the highest level. Also, it is a story of the pivotal moments in India’s transition from a Third World economy to a technology giant.

The writer claims that many of these stories about the behind-the-scenes goings-on in the government as well as in the public and private sectors have never been told before.

The book gives vivid description of Syngal’s early life, a boy from a middle-class family, displaced from home and hearth as a young child by the Partition, and growing up at a time when opportunities were few and far between compared with the post-liberalisation India of today. This is the story of an ordinary Indian, who left his secure career in London and returned home to provide the world’s best telecom services to his people.

An IIT Kharagpur graduate, Syngal surprised friends and family in 1991 when he resigned from a plush tax-free job with Inmarsat in London to head VSNL, an old-style, stodgy public sector company. Syngal recounts that in 1991, Sam Pitroda, the telecom czar of India at the time, put forth a question: “Do you prefer challenge to money? Would you agree to come back and head VSNL?” He accepted the challenge at a meagre salary of Rs9,000 a month and returned to India with a genuine desire to transform India’s global connectivity.

In his seven years at VSNL, he managed to transform a public-sector corporation into a nimble future-focussed organisation intent on putting India on the global telecommunications map. By connecting India to the world through high-speed digital links, he was instrumental in the emergence of the Indian software sector as a global player. And in a move that would revolutionise the country and all our lives, he brought the Internet to India in 1995. On Syngal’s watch, VSNL also conceived of and executed what was then the largest Global Depository Receipts issue from India for listing on the London Stock Exchange. By 1998, VSNL was one of the top 10 companies in market capitalisation and other parameter at teh Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange. During my tenure, VSNL’s revenue increased from $125 muillion to $1.6 billion and profits from $32.5 million to $240 million.

In June 1998, he was named as one of ‘The 50 Stars of Asia’ by BusinessWeek magazine. But that same week, he was fired with immediate effect, by fax, for not bowing down to pressure from VSNL’s political masters.

Later on, Syngal went on to head Reliance and BPL’s cellular telecom forays and played a key role in exposing the 2G spectrum scam.