On the day of the tele.net interview, a front-page story in many business papers was ZTE’s success in winning an order from state-run telecom company BSNL for its 6 million line broadband project.
As Dr Dilip Kumar Ghosh strode into his Gurgaon office, he looked pleased to see the news splashed on the front pages, but as CMD of ZTE, a telecom equipment manufacturer, his “mission” has only just begun. This mission is to defeat preconceptions in the Indian establishment about Chinese companies such as ZTE.
These biases date back to the 1962 war between the two Asian giants. Frosty relations lasted for decades. It was only recently that a new warmth and goodwill emerged, alongside burgeoning trade between the two countries.
However, pockets of mistrust and suspicion continue to exist among some policy-makers, which, according to Ghosh, are being exploited by ZTE’s rivals in a “nasty propaganda war” against ZTE.
ZTE and the other main Chinese telecom player, Huawei Technologies, have been struggling to win orders against rivals such as Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens.Ghosh believes the European giants have been lobbying against ZTE by playing on “security” fears in the government about Chinese companies working in the infrastructure sector.
The BSNL order may mark a turning point in ZTE’s fortunes but Ghosh says that he still has a lot of work to do to remove misapprehensions about the company he joined about a month ago. He left Siemens after more than a decade and acknowledges that in choosing ZTE, he has “joined the enemy camp”.
“At Siemens, we were losing tender after tender to ZTE,” he says. “ZTE’s product is not just less expensive but more suitable for markets like India. Western products are overpriced and overengineered for India where the biggest need is for voice. ZTE is more flexible and innovative, which is why it and other Chinese companies are posing such a big threat to existing players.”
Ghosh says that existing players are very powerful and active in their efforts to stifle the growth of Chinese companies. “They are lobbying very hard in the government where they can have some influence but we are getting a good response from private sector telecom companies such as Reliance for our network equipment.”
His aim is to make ZTE an “Indian multinational headquartered in China”.He wants to have Indians replacing expatriates and says the company might even go public at some stage. Ghosh is the most senior non-Chinese employee of ZTE worldwide.
In working for ZTE, his biggest difficulty is the language barrier but he has already come up with a solution. He is creating a team of translators who will act as a buffer between ZTE’s Indian employees and their Chinese counterparts. Indians willing to learn Mandarin will also be helped and encouraged.
“We have excellent products at good prices, we are very strong technically and have a very young and energetic workforce.I want to take this company to a verystrong position in five years’ time. Interms of creativity and innovation, we areleading the way. I want ZTE to be a topplayer, a respected brand and a companythat every Indian would be proud to beassociated with.”
Ghosh says that many Chinese companies have won infrastructure contracts and yet they were barred in tenders for the modernisation of Delhi and Mumbai airports. For example, reports suggest that Huawei and ZTE have deployed more than 60 per cent of BSNL’s broadband equipment across the country. In the mobile handset segment too, ZTE plans to bring its full range of GSM handsets to India. And yet, Chinese companies are categorised as a “security threat”.
“It’s hard to work out what the logic is over this so-called `security’ issue. It seems contradictory. It would be useful if everyone knew exactly what determines policy on this matter, to get more transparency,” he says.
During the time that he worked for Siemens, Ghosh wrote two books looking at how the digital divide can be bridged to help the poor. The first was The Digital Transformation. The latest is Digital India, Rural Empowerment and Transformation.Both works are the result of an abiding commitment to using the latest technology to solve the problem of poverty.
“I grew up in Calcutta and imbibed the ethos of that city, which is based on a desire to improve the lot of the poor. I’m not a communist but, like many Bengalis, I cannot ignore the downtrodden. My wife Deepa is of the same mind. We grew up with this concern because this awareness of poverty and the desire to reduce it has always been higher in Bengal than in any other state,” he says.
Using his 35 years’ experience of the electronics and telecom industry, Ghosh has worked on many projects to help the rural poor. Some of them feature in his latest book. One is a pilot project in Baramati village in Maharashtra where the local women have been encouraged to set up a cooperative. They have been taught to use computers and use these to find out the best prices for their milk and milk products. By not having to go through middlemen who invariably fleece them, the women fetch a better price for their product and are better off than before.
“If all goes well, we intend to replicate the project in many other parts of the country. Anything that can bring in more income for the poor is to be welcomed. All this technology represents tools that can be used by the poor once they have access to them and know how to use them,” he says.
“Even more importantly, once we have established the use of mobiles, the internet and computers, we will be able to stem the mass migration of people from the villages to the cities. Rural women will become entrepreneurs and they will actually be creating jobs in their villages for others. So villages will be self-sufficient.”
Ghosh spent 11 years working with Siemens. His last post was as executive director and board member of Siemens Public Communications Network.
Ghosh wanted to be a poet when he left St Xavier’s in Calcutta. But his father firmly scotched his romantic desires with “you can’t live off poetry; you must become an engineer”, and he became an engineer instead, graduating from IIT Kharagpur.Later he got himself an MBA and a Ph.D.
To compromise, he chose to become a telecom engineer rather than an electrical engineer. Ghosh is a fellow of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers and is on the policy-making bodies of numerous industry and trade associations.
None of this has stopped him continuing to write, both poetry and fiction, whenever he has the time and the inspiration. His wife also writes poetry but he says that hers is much better than his.
Does he plan to publish his poems one day? He laughs: “No, no publisher will ever touch them! I write for my own pleasure. Once or twice a month, my wife and I organise cultural evenings at our home where we have music and poetry recitations followed by refreshments. I’m not even allowed to recite my poetry here as my guests won’t tolerate it.”
Ghosh has worked for various companies over the years, including a 19-year stint with Philips in Kolkata and Mumbai. Even after 35 years in the business, telecom still excites him. Now, of course, it is even more exhilarating than ever before because of the fantastic rate of change that renders products obsolete very fast.
It is here that he believes Chinese companies are scoring by their ability to produce the right equipment for emerging markets. “The average Indian consumer does not want a feature-rich mobile. He wants a basic phone at a fantastically attractive price, and that is what ZTE offers,” he says.
The product of a Jesuit education, Ghosh says that one thing the fathers taught him was to laugh at himself. He says that too many people in Delhi take themselves too seriously. “They could have a less stressful life if they took themselves less seriously.”
For keeping stress at bay, he undergoes what he calls an hour-long “ordeal” of Art of Living breathing exercises and yoga every morning. He is not, however, a follow of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder of Art of Living.
Ghosh is looking forward to visiting China in December. Before that, he will be busy with the visit of the ZTE head, as part of the delegation accompanying Chinese president Hu Jintao, for a fourday visit to India from November 20.
