Are You Listening (An Old Book)

An eminent telecommunications engineer and manager who held important positions in national and international telecommunications organizations (General Manager of Telephones and Telecoms, Dy. Director General in the Department of Telecoms, Chairman and Managing Director of Videsh Sanchar Nigam limited, Governor of INTELSAT, Washington, and INMARSAT, London, Senior Expert of the International Telecommunications Union) Tripuraneni Hanuman Choudary has extensive knowledge of telecommunications systems, services and the revolutionary changes coming all over the world. He sees telecommunications as a facilitator of business, industry, management wealth creation, social inter-course and national economic development. He believes that provision of telephone services by a Government monopoly is inefficient, non-enterprising, unsatisfactory and should be ended. Rendering services at prices related to costs and bringing down costs by application of technology is more important and sensible than administering code book rules. He is author of several hundred popular articles propagating the vision of universal telecommunications and information services at affordable prices by people's enterprises.

'n this book, he records how in thirty and more years of telecommunications even as a Government servant, he innovated and initiated people-oriented practices battling against bureaucracy all the while. He believes that telephones are to be extended to rural areas as a development process just like community development or family planning, or illiteracy eradication and shows how it was done in Andhra Pradesh. He points out the lessons that even other developing and socialist countries have for India.

He is the Chairman of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and also the founder Vice-President of the Centre for Telecommunications Management and Studies besides being the President of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (India).

One of the missions of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan is communicating to the largest number of people knowledge and wisdom contained in our valuable and ancient literature. Communication is a skill and can be effected over multi mode media. Recognizing this, the Bhavan has founded the Rajendra Prasad Institute of Communication and Management in 1960. It was inaugurated by the renowned communicator and journalist, Louis Fisher under the President ship of Sri. Morarji Desai.

Post Graduate Diploma Courses in more than ten subjects like Journalism and Marketing are conducted from over forty centers in India. About seven thousand persons are appearing in the examinations every year.

Scientific and technological inventions are making ever-more effective and efficient variety of communications media while broadcast radio and television enable one to many, one-way communications, telephone enables any person to communicate with any at his will and comfort and convenience at any time. The telephone networks are world- wide and globally interconnected transcending national boundaries, bridging oceans and crossing deserts and icy wastes. The profound longing and hope of (all the world is one family) can be realized by wisely managed telecommunications networks in all the countries of the world. In the affluent countries telephone service is universal and is becoming the basis for a variety of information and knowledge services. Computers becoming ever so small in size, ever so fast and powerful in processing and increasingly affordable for many are getting linked together and inter-communicating with one another over telecommunication networks. This synergy of computers and communications opens the prospect for people anywhere, access to the world's store-houses of information and know- ledge, enabling us to realize the invocation:

(let noble thoughts come from every side).

All of us are looking forward to the establishment and growth and development of a communications network over which our people would be able to freely converse, exchange text and not very long from now, see one another too. Sri. T.H. Chowdary besides being an eminent telecommunications engineer has been a people-sensitive manager. He has held several positions of responsibility in national and international telecom organizations in several cities and states. So his experience and endeavors, initiatives and innovations in transforming traditional rule- administering entities into problem-solving and need-fulfilling enterprises would be of interest for all practitioners of communications and their managers. Sri. Chowdary has been associated with the Bhavan for over two decades. He has been contributing to the Bhavan's Journal. It is therefore with great pleasure that the Bhavan is publishing Sri Chowdary's book "Are you Listening". The ideas and questions in the book are addressed to not only telecommunications people in Government, but to all those who desire that every service should be people-oriented.

For the last four decades, telecommunications in India are suffering from inadequacy in quantity and quality. As more and more prosperous people and businesses and enterprises are emerging as a result of our planned economic development, telecommunication services under the erstwhile Posts & Telegraphs (P&T), and now under the Department of Telecommunications (DOT), being administrate red according to rules contained in more than a dozen code-books dealing back to more than half a century, have become unequal and irresponsive to the needs of the customers. Persons in Government service would seek a career, and conformance to rules is the safest to practice. Although one sees that as life is changing and as new situations are arising, rules codified in a different era and under a different usage pattern are now no guide and are even irrelevant, few would take initiatives to render service when rules and precedents and practices are not there or are ambiguous. They are apt to make references to higher and higher authorities for whom they become cases for disposal rather than the initiation of a new service to meet a new need. The P&T has been recruiting excellent engineers into its Indian Telecommunications Engineering Service (lets). It is a matter of amazement that all their brilliance as engineers and technical persons has not been able to forge a dynamic organization and practices designed to meet customer needs. The reason appears to be that there has been no realization that management is different from ad- ministration of rules, especially the management of a utility service like the telecommurrications, so crucial a consumption element for the efficient and effective conduct increasingly of every enterprise. Even if management training is given I wonder how, while remaining as part of a civil service and as a Government Department, a totally customer- oriented and problem-solving management is possible.

From my college days, I have been having a questing spirit. It has very much to do with my forebear, Kaviraju Tripuraneni Ramaswamy Chowdary, who was iconoclastic, a social reformer and a rebel against formalized religion and social practices. Contacts and association with Communists in my youth and in college further sharpened my social conscience. Even in the DOT, I had the inspiring leadership of great enablers and achievers like Shri J.R. Sengupta, who is no more, Shri D.F.D. Joshi, Shri K.D. Vaidya, and two IAS Directors-General of the P&T, Shri J.A. Dave and Shri S.K. Ghosh, both of whom are no more. I have been a voracious reader of politics, economics and social philosophy and history. I have come to the conclusion that if one has not made money, if the Government is not put to loss, and if the customer's cause is advanced, the breaking of irrational rules may be a technical violation of civil service conduct, but a socially desirable and necessary initiative, required in every right-thinking, service-oriented officer. I very much remember the advice given by the late Sir S.V. Ramamurthy, ICS, to a new entrant into the service: "Don't break a rule. Neither should you seek one where it doesn't exist." While I have very scrupulously followed the latter part, I had to very often twist or break or disregard irrational, irrelevant, or invalid rules, taking the precaution, however, of reporting my actions to the higher authorities. In my perpetual quest for customer-oriented and problem-ameliorating practices, I had taken many initiatives, bold in their time and apparently very ordinary a decade thereafter. I have the satisfaction that many of my "unruly" actions and decisions have later on become rules and prescribed procedures. A list, not a very exhaustive one, of the initiatives and innovations that I indulged in, can be seen in the Appendix.

This book narrates some of the actions that I have taken over a period of 37 years since the 10th of October, 1952 when I first entered into the service of the Government of India in the All India Radio in New Delhi, and later in the DOT which I joined in September 1956.

Working alongside Mazdoors, Technicians, Wiremen and Cable Jointers in the telephone installations in Calcutta, and in the Railway Electrification Project (Rourkela to Kharagpur via Jamshedpur), and planning, operating, maintaining and managing the telecommunications systems of cities and States, and then India's international telecommunications in the final phase of my service, has been a profoundly exhilarating, rewarding and satisfying job. The events that I have narrated necessarily bring in some of the persons who were either facilitating or frustrating my actions. I have not been very generous in describing the attitudes and actions of the frustrates, for, twice in my career have the manipulations of these people led my actions to the scrutiny of the Public Accounts Committee, in the sequel of which I had come out un- scathed.

**Contents and Sample Pages**