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Sam Pitroda, regarded as the father of India's telecom revolution, interviewed by Peerzada Abrar (The Hindu)
-The Hindu

Online media companies don’t take responsibility for their content, he says

Sam Pitroda, regarded as the father of India’s telecom revolution, says that he is deeply concerned with the way social media is being misused globally to propagate lies, hatred and false ideas. In an interview, Mr. Pitroda says that in India also, social media has not been used effectively and technology is not meant to be misapplied.

He says that media technology companies such as Facebook and Google don’t take responsibility for the truthfulness of their content and that globally there has to be a movement on social media and ethics. Edited excerpts:

* How do you see technology initiatives like Aadhaar and digital banking shaping up in the country?

We have come a long way in IT and telecom in India. When I started my work in India in telecom, we had about two million telephones, it used to take 10 years to get telephone connection. Now we are a country of a connected billion; we have billion phones [and] at the same time we generate $130 billion worth of software export and services. IT and telecom have given us a great deal of global recognition, confidence, new industries, wealth and wealthy people. But at the same time, we have a long way to go. We still don’t have broadband connectivity in large parts of India, especially rural India. We still don’t use IT effectively in our education, health, governance. Aadhaar was a really great initiative to take all our residents and identify them. Now the challenge is to use Aadhaar to provide various services, whether banking, pension, employment, you name it. So one aspect is to use IT to do the same things that we do today. Another aspect is to use IT to do things that we have never done before. That is a bigger challenge, that requires change in the mindset, that requires new governmental organisation architecture.

* Could you explain how?

Take for example, judiciary. Today, we have 32 million court cases pending. It takes 10 years sometimes to get justice, a lot of useless paper work. Of course, it is important from the view point of how we have done it. But in today’s terms, it doesn’t make sense. Every case just takes its own time. Can we use IT effectively to reduce this back log from 32 million to 3,00,000? Can we get justice in a year? Technology is there but the will to use technology and change our processes is lacking. Today, the real challenge is process re-engineering. Our processes are obsolete and not suitable for the need of the hour. A lot of these processes were designed 50, 70, 100 years ago. Today, we are using computers to computerise age-old processes as opposed to say, for the era today. We need new processes and then we can computerise it.

* Are there any other challenges in the use of technology?

Right now, one of my concerns relates to how do we use social media. To me, social media is misused globally to propagate lies, hatred, false ideas. The other day, I saw somebody writing about Motilal Nehru, that he had five wives and Akbar was his son, all that kind of [nonsense], all lies. But somebody would tweet that, put that on WhatsApp, it would go to four million people and all of sudden it would become the truth.

Who are these people? They propagate a message which is totally false, but they get a hearing. Nobody takes responsibility for it. Today you can start tweeting that Sam Pitroda is corrupt, that you and I met and you gave me ?10 lakh, it will sell because lies sell. You take Facebook, Google and all the others. They don’t take responsibility for their content but they are media companies. They want more clicks, because they get paid on clicks; there is more gossip, there are more clicks.

This is a great concern for me. We have started a not-for-profit initiative out of Paris (to address this challenge). I am one of the directors. Globally there has to be a movement on social media and ethics, social media and truth. In social media, anybody can hide and say anything. The amount of hatred that goes on in social media against minorities, all kinds of people, women, children, pictures of children... it is just pathetic. Is that what the technology is supposed to do? In India also, social media has not been used effectively. And you don’t know where to go. You can write anything about anything and get away with it and people would start spreading this. We need to be conscious of it.

* You headed the India Inclusive Innovation Fund and the government had announced a ?10,000 crore start-up fund. What has been the impact of these initiatives?

In this country, start-up companies are starving for risk capital. Risk capital is not available here because a lot of our business people don’t want to venture out into risk capital. They want a sure return, short-term return and without risk capital, it is difficult to build new businesses. The idea (India Inclusive Innovation Fund) we had then in the UPA government time was to create risk capital and we had already launched the ?5,000 crore fund.

* What you have today is a fund mainly managed by the government.

And according to me, you can’t have government officers manage risk capital; they don’t have experience, they have never managed risk capital. This is not a job that anybody can do. You need people who have invested in new ventures in the past.

* Do you invest in start-ups? What kind of bets have you made?

I don’t look at them as bets, I look at them more as exciting technology developments. I have (invested in) one company called Aerial Intelligence where we take satellite data and through artificial intelligence predict the agricultural yield of wheat, sugar, soya bean, coffee, tea and potato. It took us about two years to develop right algorithms and all that. It is based out of Stanford University. I have another company on Big Data and analytics.

* What kind of new opportunities do you see for start-ups here?

Everywhere I look around, I see huge opportunities, mainly because I see the world we live in today is obsolete. If we were thinking of the tools we have today, we would probably do things differently. There are huge opportunities in education, health, transportation, energy. Every industry is waiting for generational change, but it is risky; you have to create the right business model, show where one could make money, save money... but that is tough. It requires a different discipline. We may have a lot of start-ups here, but we don’t have enough mentors and that is why start-ups don’t succeed much. You see a lot of hype but there is very little going on, because you don’t have big mentors. A lot of our people who have built big companies have not built big companies based on products. They have built big companies based on labour. I take ten thousand people from here and put them in the U.S., that is one model. Other models are copies of western models, [for example, the] car. We don’t have Indian models of development, indigenous thinking. It will happen, but we don’t have enough of it. We have to change our mindset.

* You are passionate about education, what should be the impact of IT in it?

Information technology brings about openness, accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratisation, decentralisation. With the Web today, we have so much good content available on every subject. From subjects like religion, how to make wine, to Physics, Chemistry, Math, health... How do you take content and curate it properly? And then offer it to students so that they begin to learn not from a lecture given by a professor, but through a content deliverer on the Internet and they become the self-learners? How you motivate people to learn on their own is a big challenge today. Technology is there but we still use it for the traditional class room. We still have four-year degree programmes, we still have a teacher who comes and delivers lectures. That has to change.
 
The Hindu, 8 May, 2017, please click here to access
 
Image Courtesy: The Hindu