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Government rejects probe into Sankhya Vahini

Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi

The Communist Party of India-Marxist Rajya Sabha MP Nilotpal Basu has written to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, expressing concern that controversial Sankhya Vahini project's technology could have serious repercussions on the security of the country.

Addressing a crowded press conference here in Parliament, Basu released copies of his letter to the prime minister written on May 1. The letter underscored that existing data networks in the country could only take 34 megabits per second. Sankhya Vahini will allow data flow between 2.5 and 40 gigabits per second. Thus, the new network with roughly 1000 times the existing bandwidth, would give users unprecedented leverage over future data and voice-transfers making it a potential techno-monopoly, it said..

Basu emphasised that the high-speed data network technologies are in their infancy and, therefore, "both in China and US, where similar networks have been set up, are under government and essentially defence control.

" It is in this global context that the government will have to decide on the Sankhya Vahini project where the control of the network will be exercised by the foreign venture partner," Basu said.

Sankhya Vahini India Limited is a proposed joint venture between the Government of India (45 per cent owned by the Department of Telecom Services, four per cent by the ministry of human resource development and two per cent by the ministry of information and technology) and IU Net, a fully-owned subsidiary of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, which owns 49 per cent.

According to Basu, it is clear that even after the major questions posed by the standing committee on communication, "difference of perception and confusion prevails within the government". He said that that in response to his questions about the antecedents of IU Net in the Rajya Sabha, he received fundamentally different replies.

He said that for the first time, the nation was informed about IU Net being a 100 per cent subsidiary of an entity called GU Net. Neither the cabinet nor the standing committee on communications was informed about this, Basu alleged.

" Therefore, it is necessary for the government to disclose the real promoters of the GU Net, together with the share-holding pattern, relationship with the CMU and all other financial parameters," he said.

" This is the backdoor entry of a private company in the area of long-distance fibre network communication and it has not been transparent," Basu said, adding that "it is scandalous to go ahead with the project." He called for a joint parliamentary probe to get behind the truth.

Basu also released letters the secretary, ministry of information technology, R V Jayakrishnan, sent to his counterpart in the department of telecom services, P S Saran.

Jayakrishnan had emphasised there that the full proposal of the Sankhya Vahini project had not been discussed in the Telecom Commission. He said a copy of the memorandum of understanding pertaining to the project had been submitted to the commission without the technical/business plans.

" Therefore, it is not correct to say that the concept has been seen and approved by the Telecom Commission as had been stated in the comments on the note to the cabinet," Jayakrishnan said.

In his letter to Saran, Jayakrishnan had asked what was the reason IU Net was selected.

He also wanted to know what was the policy adopted by DTS/DOT to lease fibre to other parties including NRIs. He had asked if such leasing should not have been through a more transparent procedure instead of an MoU.

After posing many other questions pertaining to the inadequate transparency on the selection of IU Net in the Sankhya Vahini project, Jayakrishnan had said that Minister of Information Technology Pramod Mahajan had also raised various posers on these issues at the cabinet meeting on January 19.

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