We should have had 100 m phones not just 30 m: Pitroda

NEW DELHI: So, has Sam Pitroda been requisitioned by Sonia Gandhi to revamp the Congress Party? "I'm here on a short, private visit and I am not going to make any comments on the political situation in the country," says this chairman of World Tel. With an eye on the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, Congress president Sonia Gandhi is reported to have contacted Pitroda and asked him to prepare a blueprint to recharge the party's functioning. The `Pitroda Plan' (PP) as it is called, is aimed at breathing new life into the Congress' organisational structure. But Pitroda is not talking. "No comments," he says when asked to comment on the plan. And neither is he going to reveal his thoughts about Sonia's attempts to revitalise the party. However, Congressmen insist Sonia, a stickler for details, is determined to modernise the 630 Congress district and central AICC offices. Pitroda is a disillusioned man today. One of the few Indians to renounce an American citizenship for an Indian one, he has now moved lock, stock and barrel back to the US. A major heart attack and then a quadruple bypass in 1989, made him decide to quit India. "I spent all the five million dollars I had earned in the US, on my treatment. I had to go back to earn money to see my two kids through college," he says during his three-day visit to India. But he doesn't want to be drawn into fresh controversies. When Rajiv Gandhi put him in-charge of the Technology Mission on Telecom, his appointment drew flak. That made him work harder. "I didn't take care of my health; I was working round-the-clock. That phase of my life is over. I've moved on," he says. Looking back, Pitroda feels they did succeed in making progress in the fields of literacy, immunisation, drinking water and telecom. "In telecom, we succeeded in introducing privatisation and setting up bodies such as MTNL, VSNL, digitisation and hundreds of STD/ISD PCOs. The groundwork for the telecom revolution was put in place in the eighties." But he is dissatisfied with the progress made in this sector. He believes India should have had 100 million phones, not 30 million as they exist today. "If China can do it, why not we? India continues to be riddled with too much red tape," he says. His low opinion of India can be gauged from the fact that World Tel has offices in several African, Asian and South American countries, but not in India. He's retired now and would rather spend time with his two children. And if the Congress needs a revamp, he would rather do it sitting in the US of A.