Former Congress and socialist leader KP Unnikrishnan, who died in Kozhikode on March 3, was an elected member of Parliament six times between 1971 and 1995. He will be remembered for his political and parliamentary career and his public life spanning several decades. However, few can recall the impact of his nearly three-month – from December 1989 to April 1990 – tenure as communications minister in the short-lived government of Prime Minister VP Singh. Unnikrishnan’s brief stay at Sanchar Bhawan was fraught with controversy, derailing one of independent India’s most successful technology development programs – the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) – and ending Sam Pitroda’s career as a technology policy maker. Unnikrishnan’s crackdown on the Telecom Research and Development Organisation, which had heralded the communications revolution with its indigenously developed rural telephone exchange technology, was so severe that it barely recovered in subsequent decades.
The communication scenario in India in the 1970s and 1980s was pathetic. Telephone connectivity was very poor. The national waiting list to get a landline connection was 8.42 lakh in 1987, which translated into a waiting period of three to four years. Connectivity in rural areas was worse, with only 3% of the 6 lakh villages having telephone connections. The quality of service was also poor with high downtime.
The main reason for this was the dependence on imports for telecommunication equipment such as switches, transmission lines and equipment. Multinational telecom companies determined the level and type of technology India needed. Imported analog exchanges were not suitable for Indian climatic conditions and often broke down due to high temperatures and dust. They also could not handle high call volumes in India.
In 1980, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi constituted a committee to review telecommunication infrastructure. A US-based Indian technologist made a radical suggestion to the panel: that India should develop and manufacture digital switches instead of importing them, as was supported by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). Over the next few years, the idea took shape and in 1986 C-DOT was born, with Sam Pitroda as its chairman.
C-DOT was a departure from the past. Pitroda did not want it to become another government R&D organization on the lines of existing laboratories and national institutes administered by various ministries. It was formed as an autonomous society, funded by the government, but with functional independence on the lines of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). The agency was given a fixed budget and a strict deadline – Rs 36 crore and 36 months – to develop the indigenous switches. The idea was to introduce the next level of technology and do so indigenously. Unlike prevalent crossbar exchanges, the proposed digital switch was largely software-based.
Young engineers and technologists were recruited. He worked as a project team in Bangalore and Delhi. A new work culture was promoted. People worked long hours. They were not paid ‘overtime’ as per government rules, but were given incentives such as paid holidays.
The unconventional R&D unit attracted national and international media attention. One American industry analyst wrote, “Young blue-jeaned computer programmers are working all night, the walls are full of PERT diagrams, weekend retreats, employee mentoring programs and performance-linked awards. But this isn’t Silicon Valley, this is India. This isn’t Apple Computer, this is government-run C-DOT.”
But domestically, C-DOT and Pitroda faced a hostile bureaucracy and an uncooperative DOT. Questions were raised in Parliament and the press regarding the functioning of C-DOT. In response to allegations of financial irregularities and violations of government rules, inter-governmental committees were immediately formed to review the functioning of C-DOT, but they did not report any financial irregularities. Pitroda had probably decided not to take salary from the government due to fear of such questions.
As promised, C-DOT not only developed the Digital Rural Exchange but also developed several other projects in the given time frame, as well as new modes of technology transfer and a base of Indian vendors. All this helped it break the stronghold of American and European telecom suppliers in India. Combined with another innovation – Subscriber Trunk Dialing, or STD – the C-DOT digital switch dramatically improved telecommunications connectivity across the country, ushering in a communications revolution.
When Unnikrishnan took over as Communications Minister in December 1989, Pitroda and, because of his association, C-DOT were being targeted by the top bureaucracy as well as Rajiv Gandhi’s political opponents. Pitroda became an easy target for Gandhi’s political opponents, including those in the Congress Party because he was seen to influence important decisions as an important member of the informal group of “computer boys” who had direct access to the Prime Minister. Pitroda led Gandhi’s pet programme, the ‘Technology Mission’. Moreover, the success of C-DOT had upset the telecom multinationals. All this put Pitroda and C-DOT in a difficult position as Rajiv Gandhi and Congress faced defeat.
On the very first day of assuming charge as minister, Unnikrishnan publicly humiliated Pitroda, allegedly for being late in welcoming him when he reached Sanchar Bhawan. Within a week he constituted a high-level expert committee under the chairmanship of KPP Nambiar, former chairman of the Indian Telephone Industry, to investigate C-DOT. It included all eight members of the inter-departmental committee that had examined and approved the performance of C-DOT twice in 1986 and 1988. C-DOT Executive Director GB Mimamansi was also made a member. Nambiar then constituted a one-member subcommittee specifically to review C-DOT’s procurement.
“The deliberations during the expert committee meetings, while reviewing the findings of the sub-committee, showed a planned witch-hunt rather than an honest review of the work done by C-DOT. An atmosphere of despair and uncertainty hung over more than 600 young C-DOTians,” Mimamansi later recalled in his memoirs. He and three other committee members submitted a dissenting note. Nambiar did not include the note in his final report and submitted it to Unnikrishnan before the due date. When the dissent note was handed over to Unnikrishnan, he called it a “parallel report” and refused to make it part of the report submitted by Nambiar. The Nambiar report was also presented during the weekend. The next working day, Unnikrishnan issued orders dismissing two of the four members who wrote the dissent notes – Mimamsi and DR Mahajan – from C-DOT. Two weeks later, Unnikrishnan was stripped of the communications portfolio and replaced by Janeshwar Mishra.
Unnikrishnan’s three-month tenure as Communications Minister at a critical point of technology development and diffusion derailed the entire indigenization project. Although C-DOT eventually provided 10,000-line and 40,000-line exchanges as promised, the momentum that had been created for innovation and product development was lost. Fed up with the poor behavior of founders and mentors like Pitroda and Mimamsi, many young engineers marched to the Prime Minister’s residence in Delhi and staged a walkout when Unnikrishnan went to address him in Bengaluru.
Within a few months C-DOT reported a mass exodus of scientists and engineers, making it a classic case of brain drain. Many were easily recruited by multinational telecommunications companies, which made a comeback in the years following the 1991 liberalization, while others became entrepreneurs.
There are many lessons in this episode that remain relevant even after four decades. Despite changes in the political system, indigenous technology development requires continued support from the political and administrative machinery. The development teams and organizations involved need functional autonomy and freedom from mundane bureaucratic restrictions. Technology development is risky business and cannot be bound by the traditional criteria of time and cost-overruns as well as failures. Young talent is an essential raw material and needs to be retained and nurtured in every possible way. Product development remains the sacred bedrock of technology business in India, and there is much to be learned from the history of technology development here.
Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based journalist and author, and has written books on India’s post-1947 science and technology journey.
published – March 11, 2026 08:30 am IST
