Ram Lakhan Dube, Director, BSNL

As he handles the challenge of expanding telecom services to the vast countryside, Ram Lakhan Dube, director, planning and new services, BSNL, has one advantage: he understands Indian villages as he grew up in one himself. He confesses to having a “soft corner” for villagers because he is aware of their problems. His hope is that once telecom connectivity reaches the villages, a spurt in development and awareness will happen as villagers, hitherto isolated from urban trends, become aware, through their conversations with relatives in the city, of the big wide world outside their rice and wheat fields.

Dube grew up in Siddharth Nagar, named after the Buddha owing to its proximity to the village of Lumbini, near the border with Nepal, where the Buddha was born. The only school was a 2 km walk away where his father was a teacher. Every day, the two walked to school and back.

“These long walks were an educational experience for me because my father would talk to me about all sorts of things,” says Dube. Siddharth Nagar was similar to thousands of other villages at that time ?? no electricity or running water, no telephone or radio. Dube’s house was lit by a kerosene lamp. Luckily, there was enough food.

Dube’s father had about 5 acres of land on which he grew wheat and rice. This produce supplemented his teacher’s salary.

Dube used to help out in the fields when he was older. At his current home in Delhi, he still enjoys tending to his small kitchen garden, a throwback to his days in the fields. The village land has remained in the family and Dube visits the area once a year to check that it is being looked after by his relatives.

The village school was average. Dube was taught in Hindi. Although he learnt English as a subject, fluency came much later in life. Village society was fairly limited but he enjoyed a happy childhood. “The village was peaceful and harmonious.Hindus and Muslims lived alongside one another with no tensions.”

As a teenager, he had visited a few nearby towns but had never ventured further. When the time came to enroll at Gorakhpur University, 100 km away, for a science degree, Dube felt somewhat daunted. After starting classes, he abandoned his dhoti and pyjamas and began wearing trousers for the first time.

“I realised there was a huge world beyond my village and learnt a lot from the other students who came from urban backgrounds,” says Dube. His father, to teach him independence, sent him off to Gorakhpur on his own, on the once-a-day bus service from their home. Dube would have liked the comforting presence of his father as he ventured into unfamiliar territory but his father packed him off saying only that if he had any trouble, could he summon him and he would come.

But Dube managed to organise his hostel accommodation and settled down to attending classes. They were a nightmare for six months. He could not understand a thing the lecturers said in English.Disheartened, he wrote to his father, warning him that he would be unlikely to sit for any of the exams as he was struggling badly.

Back came a letter that amounted to a statement of faith in him, a letter he has kept for sentimental reasons. “My father explained to me that life was a struggle and that only by persevering could I hope to succeed. He was confident that I would.My father was a source of inspiration to me. He was a fighter and he taught me how to fight. He taught me not to be discouraged by the fact that I was entering adult life without any privileges or advantages. So I got down to work with a renewed determination and things began falling into place.”

In fact, he got a first-class degree.That was a turning point for Dube. It pushed up his confidence and he has never looked back since. After graduating in electrical engineering from Allahabad University in 1968, he taught at the university for two years. Then he sat for the UPSC engineering exam and passed.After two years of training in Jabalpur at the telecom training centre, Dube started work at the Department of Telecommunications in Delhi in 1971. Accompanying him was Tara, his wife, whom he had been married to at the age of 15.

Dube says the hurdle in taking telecom to the countryside is the lack of power. He is relieved that power is being taken to villages and that this is happening in parallel. “That is the only possible constraint. The terminals have batteries that need to be charged. There are other issues too, such as bad roads, but that too is changing fast. We’re hoping to improve teledensity in rural areas fast and we are getting government support in the sense of the necessary infrastructure being built.”

BSNL is currently adding 60 million GSM lines, of which a large portion will go to the rural areas. It is also adding around 5 million broadband lines to supplement the existing 1 million and around 3 million CDMA lines. The idea is to get 90-92 per cent of all villages connected by next December.

Dube has worked in many parts of India ?? Bhopal, Patna, Indore, Pune and Mumbai. His posting in Patna, in 1975, was particularly memorable because he had to cope with unprecedented flooding in the city that destroyed the exchange. It was totally submerged, choked with detritus, mud and water.

For a while, to supply a service to government offices, they had to use a manual exchange. No one believed that normal services could be resumed for at least a few months but Dube had a brainwave. He asked his team to wash the exchange and then heat it to dry it up.Amazingly, it began working. His team was able to restore services in a month ?? everyone lived, ate and slept at the exchange until it was finished ?? and his efforts were widely recognised. “That’s one wonderful thing about India. In a crisis, people pull out all the stops to get something done,” he says.

Dube is fanatically loyal to his company, as are many other employees.”Whatever I am today is because of this organisation, so of course I am faithful,” he says. He has played his part in the transformation of BSNL from its earlier monopoly status to facing fierce competition from other players. He says it was one of the first public sector companies to be opened up to competition in 1996.

“It forced us to change a lot. I believe strongly that in any business, only those survive who serve the customer and care for the customer. It’s the customer who runs the business, not you. If this changes, you will be out of business. The BSNL office at Indore was the first to be exposed to competition and so we did some pioneering work there,” he says.

Dube was lucky in his experiments in that he enjoyed the support of the BSNL headquarters. The management there gave him almost carte blanche to experiment and try out new ideas, unusual for most government departments where procedural rules and caution tend to discourage innovation.

“I was able to forge a new culture, change attitudes and alter our business processes in such a way that we put the customer first. I was part of this extraordinary change. It was a great experience and very exciting. Even today, people talk about the `Indore method’ or the `Indore approach’.Now, BSNL can take on anyone.”

He was also responsible for the country’s first STD/PCO at Ahmedabad railway station when he was posted there in 1981. It was his way of giving people access to a telephone at a time when it took years to get a connection. Telecom visionary Sam Pitroda, who was in the ministry in New Delhi at the time, liked the idea and expanded it across the whole country.

Dube is still experimenting. At the BSNL office in the Statesman House at Connaught Place in the capital, he starts the day for the whole staff with a short prayer sung by Lata Mangeshkar and played on the public address system. He says it “energises” people for the day ahead.

In his spare time, Dube enjoys reading and sharing whatever new ideas or information he comes across, whether it’s about management, customer care or leadership. Sometimes, he tries out new ideas on the unsuspecting Tara but gets only a bemused look in return ?? “housewives live in their own world”, he smiles.A more receptive audience is available when he shares his ideas by giving talks to colleagues and workers.

After retirement in April, Dube wants to continue making a contribution to telecom “because it’s my life, it’s in my blood”.One possibility is teaching telecom to school or college students. “I firmly believe that if you teach young students, they can become good citizens of the country,” he says.”We’re hoping to improve teledensity in rural areas fast and we are getting government support in the sense of the necessary infrastructure being built.”