A Contribution in Time: India's electronic revolution is a timely book to remember M.S. Sanjeevi Rao—the telecom engineer and technocrat who pushed India to becoming the IT power hub it presently is.
This book is written and published by former Union minister M.M. Pallam Raju and his brother Anand Mallipudi, a tribute to their visionary father.
In a glowing foreword, former president Pranab Mukherjee described his friend and colleague Sanjeevi Rao as someone who "outlined vision of India as a modern scientific and technical power".
M.S. Sanjeevi Rao began his career as a bright student and son of Congress leader Mallipudi Pallam Raju. Rao later took a loan of Rs 3,000 from a close friend in Bengaluru to pay for his sustenance while he pursued a diploma in electronics and telecommunications at Imperial College, London. He returned to the country and started working as a technical officer in All India Radio.
Three years later, he joined the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) and developed sophisticated electronics systems for the Indian Army. He was a scientist at the government's Electronic and Radar Development Establishment, Bengaluru, and then at the Defence Research Electronics Laboratory, Hyderabad.
He was elected as an honourary fellow, one of nine such scientists conferred with this title, by the Institute of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineers.
Apart from his glowing CV, Sanjeevi Rao was a dynamic person. He worked on setting up the transatlantic cable between England and Canada in London, before returning to the country with a new vision.
He possessed a keen entrepreneurial sense. He founded two electronics-related companies on his own in the mid-sixties. One of them, Micro Ceramics, was the first Indian company set up to make electronic grade ceramic compounds.
Rao entered the political arena following his father's death. He later describes his sense of duty to uphold his father's legacy. When Rao was denied a ticket by the Congress party in 1967, subsequent to his father's death, the entire family went into shock, writes his sons.
However, with a strong political mentor in Kasu Brahmananda Reddy, former chief minister and president of Indian National Congress, Rao was elected to the 5th Lok Sabha with a record lead of 2,92,926 votes. In the 6th and 7th Lok Sabha, Rao retained his winning margin by more than one lakh votes each time.
Rao was appointed deputy minister for electronics in Indira Gandhi's cabinet, and subsequently as chairman of India's first electronics commission. "He laid the foundation of the Indian government's electronic policy," recounts Pranab Mukherjee in the book.
Rao was a landholder and deeply committed to the cause of the poor, writes his sons. Beyond electronics, too, Rao displayed visionary capabilities. As chairman of the Andhra Pradesh Fisheries Corporation, he developed Kakinada into a productive fishing community by introducing modern trawlers. His contribution later led to setting up of a World Bank-aided wooden hulled trawler building yard and subsequently to development of the modern day Kakinada port.
He pursued Shaw Wallace & Co and the Andhra Prdesh government to set up fertiliser production units in Kakinada, as Di-Ammonium Phospate (DAP) was of much need by the rice growers of Godavari districts in those days.
His initiatives later led to the formation of state-funded Godavari Fertiliser Corporation Ltd and the private fertiliser company Nagarjuna Fertiliser Corporation Ltd.
He set up India's first television transmission station in Kakinada, in 1982 and, also laid foundation to the National Informatics Centre—the current nerve centre of the Union government's IT functions.
“We saw him beat all odds with such grace, I took it for granted that he is bulletproof, my superman,” writes Rao’s doting younger son Anand Mallipudi.
“I only later realised that even superman is mortal,” he writes of Rao’s passing at the age of 86 years, after braving a stroke and living with an acute paralysis, but still staying positive for his family and grandchildren, for the last 15 years of his life.