Former Congress and socialist leader K.P. Unnikrishnan, who passed away at Kozhikode on March 3, was an elected Member of Parliament for six terms between 1971 and 1995. He will be remembered for his long political and parliamentary career spanning several decades and for his public life. Few, however, might recall the impact of his tenure as the Minister for Communications for about three months — from December 1989 to April 1990 — in the short-lived government of Prime Minister V.P. Singh. Unnikrishnan’s brief stay in Sanchar Bhawan was marked by controversies that derailed one of the most successful technology development programmes of independent India — the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) — and ended the career of Sam Pitroda as a technology policymaker. Unnikrishnan’s crackdown on the telecom R&D organisation, which heralded the communication revolution with its indigenously developed rural telephone exchange technology, was so severe that it could barely recover in later decades.
The communication scenario in India of the 1970s and 1980s was pathetic. Telephone connectivity was very poor. The national waiting list for getting a landline connection stood at 8.42 lakh in 1987, translating into a waiting period of three to four years.
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