CALCUTTA, India, Oct. 19 (UPI) -- Close on the heels of the Air India privatization fiasco and the Enron controversy, another ambitious infrastructure project is almost falling apart.
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., and IUNet Inc., the company that Carnegie Mellon set up, which was slated to be the largest shareholder of the 10 billion rupee ($208 million) broadband project christened Sankhya Vahini, have decided to pull out.
According to India's Department of Telecom, Carnegie Mellon, which initiated the project, said in its parting shot that inordinate delay in its implementation has forced the university to take the decision.
According to DoT souces, V.S. Arunachalam, the president of IUNet, said in his communication to the DoT secretary: "Even almost two years after the Cabinet approval, the project has not been sanctioned. Similar projects in other parts of the world that were not even on the drawing board when we made our original proposal are now in commercial operation and are being upgraded to higher performance levels."
Sankhya Vahini (which means "data communication" in the local language), the huge next-generation data network, was intended to revolutionize Internet use in India and transform everything from health care and education to financial services and research. The project was cleared by the Cabinet in January last year, but was subsequently mired in red tape.
In the first 12 months, it was to commission a high-speed network with bandwidth extending between 2.5 billion and 40 billion bits per second laid over 10,000 kilometers (6,214 miles).
Sankhya Vahini would have provided the largest bandwidth of any data network in the world, and was intended to have provided the entire country with Internet connectivity by now, according to industry sources. No nationwide broadband data network exists in India, although many such projects are planned.
"The problem was not about the project," the sources told United Press International. "The problem was who would implement the project; the Department of Telecom Services, (an arm of the Communications Ministry), or the Ministry of Information Technology."
The Communications Ministry was to chip in 45 percent of Sankhya Vahini's equity, 2 percent was supposed to come from the Ministry of Information Technology, while the balance was to be IUNet's stake.
But according to IUNet, neither the Department of Telecom nor the Ministry of IT was prepared to contribute its share, or undertake the project.
According to the DoT, IUNet was also frustrated by public interest litigation. A parliamentary standing committee had expressed the fear that the project would risk national security and criticized the government for signing a deal and granting permission to the project without undertaking any study about the technology available with the company. Subsequently, it filed a suit.
IUNet adds that in the course of arguments in that litigation, the judges had observed that the since no other legal bodies have objected to the project, and that there was nothing preventing the government from going ahead. "Yet the Department of Telecommunications has not moved forward in its collaboration with IUNet," Arunachalam reportedly wrote to DoT.
Sankhya Vahini ran into trouble almost as soon as it was conceived.
Opposition to the project came not only from the Congress party, India's main political opposition group, but also from the RSS, an ally to the BJP party that currently is in power.
However, according to some, the exit of IUNet may not mean the end of the road for Sankhya Vahini. DoT sources said that since there is a growing demand for broadband access in India, the government is trying to persuade Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the state-owned telecom company that provides basic and mobile telecom services to the country, to pick up the project. Bharat Sanchar officials refused to comment.
