ASHOK JHUNJHUNWALA Professor, IIT-Madras, Director, TeNet

If you are lucky, you will find your way to Ashok Jhunjhunwala's modest three-bedroom apartment in the leafy campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, blocked by a spotted deer like this writer once did. The school's campus segues into the grounds of a neighbouring deer park and is dotted with boards requesting motorists to watch out for deer. The one that blocked my path was a fine specimen, a male in the prime of its life, its antlers glistening with morning dew as it eyeballed me without fear or shyness. Then it trotted away into the woods and I continued on my way to Jhunjhunwala's abode.

The deer isn't as much out of place on the campus as the 50-year-old professor of electrical engineering is. Jhunjhunwala is a Marwari from Kolkata who has made Chennai his home for the past 22 years. He dresses like a Tamil at home, preferring the dhoti to pyjamas, sits cross-legged on the floor with an ease that could give a Tamil Brahmin a complex, and speaks chaste Tamil. And in an island of academia, he is an entrepreneur, having founded, or co-founded, seven companies. All revolve around either a uniquely Indian innovation of an existing technology or a new technology altogether. That's because Jhunjhunwala believes India requires Indian solutions. The western model of research and development is focussed on feature-enrichment, he likes to say; in a country like India, where western cost-structures are irrelevant (and out of reach to most people), the focus has to be on cost reduction. That may sound simplistic in print; in reality, it isn't, and achieving it is very, very difficult. Most communication technology, for instance, is European or American. So, to understand what Jhunjhunwala means, think an Indian communication technology. The professor did.

Today, TeNet (Telecom and Networking)-an informal group Jhunjhunwala founded along with his fellow professors at IIT, Madras, Bhaskar Ramamurthi and Timothy Gonsalves-is a thriving business network. Its constituents include Midas Communications, a company that has designed a low cost communication technology, corDect WLL (Wireless in Local Loop); Banyan Networks, which works on DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop) technology; NMS Works, a network management company; Nilgiri Networks, a Linux-based solution provider targeting small Internet Service Providers (ISPs); Integrated Soft Tech Solutions, which provides high-end software services; and n-Logue, an ISP and telco rolled into one, which hopes to use corDect to wire India's villages. TeNet has technical alliances with a few other companies, including Chennai Kavigal, which is in the business of developing Tamil language software interfaces.

Jhunjhunwala does not hold equity in any of TeNet's companies. He is a very hands-on director, serves as the public face of the group, and has appointed himself corDect's chief evangelist. That's not what he promised himself he would do 37 years ago when his grandfather died. Soon after, there were squabbles over the partitioning of wealth and the joint family broke up, scarring a 13-year-old Jhunjhunwala. When he grew up, he told himself, he would found a business that would generate enough wealth to bring the family back together.

The typical 13-year old is not concerned about wealth or the creation of it. The worship of Mammon begins later, in the mid-20s when most people lose their illusions and get on with the business of making a go of things. In that respect, Jhunjhunwala is different: it was the five years he spent in the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, that changed his mindset. This was the early 1970s; Jhunjhunwala had opted to specialise in electrical engineering on the recommendation of one of his 50-odd cousins, and like many students of the time, was influenced by social reformer Jayaprakash Narayan and the Naxalite movement. "You may disagree with the manner in which Naxalites handle issues," says Jhunjhunwala, "but these were issues that needed to be addressed." By the time he graduated from IIT, Jhunjhunwala no longer wanted to found a business and bring his family together again; now, he wanted to do something for the world at large.

In quest of experience, he spent six years in the United States: he was a student at the University of Maine for four of these; he involved himself in the activities of the Maine Peace Action and opposed the Vietnam War, apartheid, military rule in certain Latin American nations, even the National Emergency in India. Then, he taught for two years at Washington State University. Wishing to return to India, he wrote to the IITs seeking a position. "All other IITs wrote back bureaucratic letters but (P.V.) Indiresan, the Director of IIT, Madras, wrote a really nice letter and sounded genuinely interested in having me at the college." Jhunjhunwala has been teaching there ever since, but the desire to do something more than teaching, something that would make a difference, stayed with him even after his return to India. At IIT, he founded a group called Patriotic and People-oriented Science and Technology (PPST). This did three things: it helped him learn more about Mahatma Gandhi; it taught him the strengths of science and technology; and it taught him the inadequacies of existing technologies in serving the masses. There were other things as well in this time: small research projects commissioned by companies; some work for the electronics industry; an exposure to telecommunication technologies; marriage to Bhavani, a banker he met at a meeting of an environment group; and his encounter with Messrs Ramamurthi and Gonsalves in 1989. Then, it all came together.

In the early 1990s, India's teledensity was a mere 1.5 per cent. There's a direct relationship between telecommunications and the economy: the more wired a country, the healthier its economy. Unfortunately, most telecommunications majors hail from the first world where teledensity is high and the cost, as low as it needs be. This, Jhunjhuwala discovered, was still too high for India. Worse, no American or European company had reason to work on low-cost technologies. CorDect was a response to this.

In 1994, six students who were sold on Jhunjhunwala's idea that Indian technologists should stay back in India and corDect incorporated Midas Communications. Ray Stata, the then CEO of Analog Devices, a US chip major, was impressed enough with Jhunjhunwala to agree to design and supply the chipsets needed for corDect networks. And the professor raised money, in the form of future licence fees, from HFCL, Shyam Telecom, ECIL and Crompton Greaves. The revolution was on. Today, Midas has orders worth Rs 250 crore on hand, and there are corDect networks operational in countries such as Madagascar, Fiji, and Brazil. Midas was the first company Jhunjhunwala founded but his favourite has to be n-Logue.

This is Jhunjhunwala's endgame, a grand design that will take access to the masses. Despite the fact that India's teledensity has grown from 2.5 per cent (25 million connections) to 5 per cent (50 million) in the past three years, much of the country's rural hinterland remains unconnected. Jhunjhunwala's vision is to increase this to 20 per cent (200 million connections) by 2010. n-Logue hopes to provide telephony (it doesn't have a licence for this and will likely work with telcos) and internet services in these areas using corDect and a three-tier business model: internet-kiosk operators at the village level at the base; local service providers, who are franchisees of n-Logue, servicing several villages and enhancing coverage by continuously identifying possible kiosk operators in more villages in the vicinity at the middle; and n-Logue at the top. Today, n-Logue has wired up some 800 villages in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. By 2005, it hopes to have added 30,000 more villages to its fold.

The results are apparent in the villages surrounding Madurai, a city in interior Tamil Nadu where n-Logue has been active: T.S. Pandy, a 54-year-old farmer from the village of Tiruvadavur, waxes eloquent on the power of the internet-in the local dialect laced with English words such as e-mail, chat and computer. In another village, Keelavallur, kiosk operator Abdul Razack talks of teaching villagers to trade in shares online. Jhunjhunwala likes Hindi motion pics, the occasional Tamil one, and likes to cook for his friends, but the things that the internet has made possible in villages like Tiruvadavur and Keelavallur-that give him the greatest satisfaction.