So, with a little bit of arrogance and a lot of ignorance I said, “I’m going to fix this damn thing.” And I spent next 10 years of my life trying to fix India’s phones.
Rajiv Gandhi gave me the political will, and I felt without connectivity, there is no start. Then we had two million telephones, it used to take 15 years to get a telephone connection. You may not know, but your grandfather would know, your father also may not know. And today, we have 1.2 billion phones. We are a connected country of a billion.
The key question is, what do we do with this connectivity?
Second challenge was knowledge. And to bring knowledge in open domain, you need to use this connectivity and democratize information. So we started with knowledge commission, right to information, right to knowledge, all of these things didn’t mean much to people we were working with. They had no idea of what it is we were talking about. I remember when I started my work in telephones, there were so many critical front page stories in India saying why are these foreign return guys trying to fix India’s phones when you need to worry about food and agriculture?
And my answer to them was, “I don’t know how to fix agriculture, find somebody else. I know how to do my job. I can try to fix phones, I don’t guarantee I’ll be able to do it, but every little thing in India matters. You do what you know how to do best, somebody else knows something else, and we all add little drop here, little drop there, and then hopefully it adds up.”
All of the things that we dreamt of many years ago, you are really making it happen. Without your support, all of our work will be lost. Nobody will ever understand.
To me, open government is the key. Open data is the foundation. So when Obama came here, he and I spent half an hour, and I tried to explain to him what we are doing in India by putting more fiber to connect rural India, we connected him to Rajasthan, and when I explained to him the kind of platforms we are trying to build, connectivity platform, GIS, UID, data centers, cyber security applications, he was amazed.
He said, “Sam, how do you all think about things like this?” And my answer to him was, “If we don’t think like this, we cannot build new India.” It is very difficult to build New India with old tools.
64
