Vignettes of working with Rajiv Gandhi: How C-DAC was set up in 1988

We had been negotiating with the Reagan administration for a Cray supercomputer, which we needed for weather forecasting, agriculture development and, more generally, for number-crunching. We had been told that our request was being looked at favourably, and we had every expectation that the deal would go through.

I happened to be with Rajiv Gandhi one day when a call came in from Washington. When Rajiv got off the line, he looked concerned. It was Reagan, who had told him that the approval for the Cray purchase was being denied; the Americans were afraid that we would use the technology to develop a nuclear weapon on our own.

‘I don’t think that’s a problem,’ I told Rajiv. ‘We can build our own supercomputer.’

‘What do you mean? How much would something like that cost?’

‘We have the ability to do it ourselves. Off the cuff,’ I said, ‘I’d estimate a cost of about 30 million dollars—about as much as what we’d be paying for the Cray. I think we could get it done in three years at the most.’

When Rajiv agreed, we took the project up with the Scientific Advisory Council and established the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing, or C-DAC, in 1988. As with C-DOT, we made it a point to hire young engineers. We worked on parallel processing, and ultimately developed India’s first supercomputer, the PARAM. By 1990, we had produced a prototype, which we demonstrated at that year’s Zurich Supercomputer Show. Our machine was placed second after the United States. Vijay Bhatkar, a leading computer scientist, was our original CEO, and I served for a while as the chairman of the C-DAC board. Today, the centre has over a thousand engineers and is a leader in several fields of supercomputing.

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When the PM Fired Two Secretaries:

One evening I got a call from his principal secretary, Mrs Sarla Grewal. ‘Mr Pitroda,’ she said, ‘can you come over right away? We have an emergency on our hands.’

I was alarmed. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Please,’ she said, ‘just come.’

When I got to her office, she told me. ‘The PM is so angry that he just fired the secretaries of water and agriculture. He exploded at them.’

‘What do you mean “exploded” at them? Why? What exactly happened?’

‘They were reporting to the PM on what they were doing about water and agriculture. He was so furious at their presentation that he fired them both on the spot. This hasn’t ever happened that the PM would fire two senior people like this. It will cause huge problems, big disruptions in those departments. I’m sure you can convince him otherwise. Please help.’

That same night I talked to the two departmental secretaries but they didn’t have much to add to what Rajiv’s secretary had told me. ‘We were making the presentation. The PM thought it was really bad quality. He just fired us.’

I called Rajiv’s office and told them we’d like forty-eight hours. Would his office please ask him to put the decision on hold for that time? Then I told the secretaries I wanted to meet with them the next day to better understand exactly what the problem was.

‘We’ve been asked to ensure adequate water supply for rural India,’ the secretary said.

‘All right. How much water is needed?’

‘Enough. Many places don’t have adequate water resources.’

‘What kind of water are you talking about?’

‘Water.’

‘Let me ask you some questions. Do you know how much water a dog drinks?’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘I want to know. How much water does a dog drink, a buffalo, a camel, a cow, a cat, a donkey, a goat? How much do people need for bathing, how much for cooking, washing, drinking? Please get this information—then we’ll talk.’

The water secretary had simply not looked at the problem this way. He hadn’t broken the issue down into its component parts, which one would imagine would have been the first thing on his agenda. But he and the agriculture secretary were bureaucrats, not specialists. They didn’t get into the details. They were responsible for planning, but they didn’t feel that a technical understanding was essential for the planning function, or at least for their function. In their presentation to Rajiv, they had shown a kind of feel-good, advertisement-type video on India’s water and food production—pretty generalities with little substance.

Rajiv was a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy. I understood how those presentations must have infuriated him. No wonder he had stopped them midway and fired them.

I said, ‘Look, if you don’t break the problem down, how can you understand how much you need, and for what purposes? You’d require 20 litres per day, 50 litres, how much? And for whom? There are almost exactly the same number of animals per village as people. You need to know how much water they use, how much the people use. You can’t plan without knowing these things. You certainly can’t report to the PM without specifics.’

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Clean, not Corrupt:

When the Bofors scandal began to rock India, I plucked up the courage to ask Rajiv about it directly. My whole experience with him was that he was an honest person, free from greed. I never saw him do anything for the purpose of self-enrichment, and I knew him well. I was reluctant to broach the subject. I didn’t want him to think for a moment that   I believed he had done this. But at the same time I wanted to hear the truth from his own mouth. So I mustered up my courage and asked him point-blank.

‘Sam,’ he said, ‘I have not taken a penny, and neither has my family.’

Everything I knew about him said that he was clean, not corrupt. As far as I was concerned, this interaction confirmed my very belief. Okay, I thought, the Opposition is using this as a tool, but it won’t stick. The Congress was wounded, so it was probable we would lose seats in Parliament. But in any case we would stay in power.

But I was wrong. People believed the accusations flying around. I realized that during elections, lies sell well in India.